Christmas day homily

What about a counter-factual? What if the Son of God had been born into a royal family in a palace? It may be unthinkable to us, but that is because we have been formed in a Judaeo-Christian vision. If we hadn’t had been, it may have seemed quite natural. God, who is the greatest and the most powerful, would naturally be born into a family of the great and powerful.  The Hebrew prophets inveighed against the rich and powerful, but still there would have to be at least one good, rich and powerful family into which the Son of God could be born. What if the Son of God had been a rich princeling? He would have been protected, pampered and drawn into the politics of the powerful. God would be one with the powerful, the rulers of the world. Wealth and power would be signs of his favour. God would not be the one who, in the words of Mary, ‘casts down the mighty from their seats and raises up the lowly, who fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich empty away’. God would really be a giant version of us not the God who surprises us because his ways are not our ways.

The God revealed in Jesus is born as a tiny baby helpless as any new-born, born to the most inconsequential of parents, and in the most inconsequential of places, a hamlet called Bethlehem, surrounded by peasants and their animals with rough-as-guts shepherds looking on. He was raised by a carpenter and his wife in Galilee – nothing decent comes from Galilee.

This ordinariness was to irritate and anger the rich and powerful. What’s this carpenter’s son on about? Does he not know his place? He wandered from village to city, forgiving, healing people, teaching people. Occasionally he did something big – fed a huge multitude – but then he would go back to his obscure, irritating mission which in some way undermined the certainty and greatness of the great. This little man from a little place was troublesome. And so he was brought low – as low as you could get – they nailed him to a Cross and thought that was it – now he knew his place.

Yet through Jesus birth, life, work and death, God defeated sin and death for all that lives and moves. In this obscure part of the world, through this carpenter’s son with his insignificant group of followers – inconsequential people themselves for the most part – God gave a new heart to us and all of history. The great of the world did not even know it at the time and for centuries after, but God was casting down the mighty from their seats.

We start out little, we are, most of us, little in the scheme of the world. Yet we constantly chafe at this, we want to be greater, more powerful. Jesus calls us: ‘Come to me you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart.’

Jesus sought no greatness, tried to control no one. He invited, challenged, ate with – he loved, inviting people to love him back, to believe in him and so have hope. And he sent his group of fishermen and others to do the same. What seems to us the littleness of our love, of compassion, of service, of forgiveness, of acceptance, of being with is what gives life meaning and value. Through this God’s life, grace, love spreads into lives and into our world.

The lack of certainty helps us accept our littleness, it humbles us, teaches us that we are not God. God does his work through our littleness, the little child born in Bethlehem invites us to learn from him. We can learn how to be little, gracefully little from God’s Son born into littleness at Bethlehem this day.