OMELIE / Omelie EN

25 dic 2023

25/12/2023 – The Nativity of the Lord

25/12/2023 – The Nativity of the Lord

Night IS 9,1-3.5-6 Psalm 95/96 TI 2,11-14 LK 2,1-14

Dawn IS 62,11-12 Psalm 96/97 TI 3,4-7 LK 2,15-20

Day IS 52,7-10 Psalm 97/98 HEB 1,1-6 JN 1,1-18

We are concentrating above all on the readings for the Mass at Dawn, readings announcing the Savior already present in the world, already working to give the man and all men hope and joy.

Saint Paul is addressing Titus using an affectionate expression, “my child”, and he is telling him the meaning of Jesus’s coming. He says the following: “When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy”. Jesus’s birth is goodness of God and loving kindness towards men: it is a fact that changes our history. In men’s history, made up of selfishness and sufferings, comes in strongly God’s love, and this love saves us, because it begins taking the place of the different acts of selfishness the men’s heart is drenched in, acts of selfishness which create injustices without end and therefore sufferings at every level. God saves us with His love, and this love is visible to us in the person of Jesus.

Already the prophet Isaiah, by announcing the coming of the Savior, gives hope and trust. His presence will transform the Hebrews, scattered and hopeless, in a “holy people, the redeemed of the Lord”. This people will be important for all peoples on earth, so much so that these will look for it, because only in it can be found true love and the certainty of a future of peace: this is why it will be called “sought out” the “daughter Zion”, meaning the city of Jerusalem, a city which represents the whole people of God.

These are not good ideas, they are not delusional dreams. There it is, the description Luke is giving us: the shepherds, the people living in precarious conditions, in poverty, despised by the rich of the world, help one another to find the courage to go and have a look at what the angels have told them. Will it be an illusion? Will it be a mirage like many others in the past? “They went in haste”: in their going they know they are obeying God, the God who often, through the prophets, has introduced Himself like one of them, a shepherd of sheep.

They find “Mary and Joseph, and the infant”, nothing extraordinary. They find a small family, like many other poor families. The baby is laid in the manger, like their babies, even if the parents are not shepherds like them. The Word is made flesh, the Word announced and sung to the Word made flesh! This simple analogy becomes wonder, silence, joy.

They who hear telling the facts in their simplicity, are amazed, because they realise they are looking at something wanted and gifted by God, by a God who is very close to us, poor with the poor, weak with the weak, without expectations for whom cannot have expectation.

The Mother, who has wrapped the baby in the sheets and knows what everyone else does not, keeps silent: she, in her silence, pieces together other words only she has heard, and other events only she has lived, and she draws conclusions only she knows about and can understand: she treasures them in her heart, letting however out from her face and the peace of her heart a happiness which spread even without her knowledge.

The shepherds, who now go back to their everyday life, carry with them, in their work and in their family and in their meetings, hope and joy: they know that God exists, that He is here with them, that He has addressed His Word to them and has given them a concrete promise of mercy and peace, an advance of the eternal paradise.

We are the heirs of Mary and the shepherds.

We are full of wonder, because the Nativity of Jesus radiates a spirit of serenity and communion, we are happy about Mary’s joy and we want to keep alive in us the hopes of the presence of God, we are able, like the shepherds, to start living again in our society and our family with a new heart, without expecting from or asking anything of men: we ourselves in fact have to spread the great love we have been made able of.