Today, good sisters and brothers, we celebrate the beginning of the new year. If you’re like me, I suspect that you come to this New Year’s Day with mixed feelings: glad that the old year is finally past, yet uncertain about what is to come. Peace in the world seems farther away than it has been in recent years, and politicians rattle swords and threaten a new nuclear arms race. The times are uncertain, as they have always been.
Today, we gather as a community of believers who hold on for dear life to the promise that God will bless us in his mercy. On this feast of the Octave of Christmas, we celebrate our affiliation--our sonship, our daughterhood, that’s what the word means—our affiliation to the living God who is father of our Jesus, who is also son of Mary. Through Mary’s cooperation with God’s plan, Jesus became brother to all of us, brother in the flesh.
The great mystery of the incarnation of Jesus who was named this day as one who would save his people, that mystery is deep and rich. God looked on the mess we had made, our incomprehension and confusion, and sent his son as one of us not to fix everything that we had disarranged, but to stand in solidarity with us in our very frailty; to embrace us as sisters and brothers, to ransom us, as St. Paul tells us, from our slavery to sin and death and the law. His very name says it all: Jeshua, Jesus means “God Saves.” And because Jesus came in human flesh, the son of the most high made visible, we can call him brother, and call God “Abba”, “Papa.”
Yet today we celebrate the physical as well as the metaphysical mystery of the incarnation: we celebrate as we begin this new year the solemnity of Mary the Mother of God. We celebrate that through her flesh, God became flesh. We celebrate that through her consent to God’s unlikely offer spoken by the Angel Gabriel, the infinite God could be contained in a single then a dividing human cell. We celebrate that God first tasted the milk of human kindness from his mother’s breast. We celebrate his ordinary life of nights and days in the house and carpenter shop of Nazareth, in his work and pleasure and pain as part of the human family, guided and taught by a very human mother and foster father.
We celebrate the ordinariness of most of his life, as he grew in age and wisdom, instructed by the wisdom of his parents and his tribe. And we celebrate his mother’s role in his ministry and his mother’s fidelity, standing at the foot of his cross on that awful Friday afternoon, and sitting at the center of the circle of disciples at Pentecost. There the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples for the first time, and on her for the second time, making her then, and now, not only the Mother of God, but Mother of the Church, Mother of us all.
Our world is uncertain, dangerous, fearful, to be sure. We each of us is called, each of us needs in our own small ways to work for peace and reconciliation, for justice and mercy. And those seem like, those are daunting tasks. Yet our hope is what gathers us here at Christ our Hope Catholic Church: our hope in the God whom we are invited to call “Papa”, our trust in the benevolent care of the Virgin Mother of Jesus for all her children, Mother of Jesus, Mother of us all, then and now and always and forever.
Fr. Tom Lucas, S.J.