This is the
third instalment of a four-part homily. In the first
instalment, I spoke of salvation in terms of "already" and "not yet". Christ
is already reigning through His Church but all the things of this world are not yet
subjected to Him. Thus, the Vigil Mass last night might be considered as a
joyful celebration in anticipation of Christ’s coming. We dared to celebrate
because we acknowledged and trusted in God’s providence.
In the second
instalment, the focus was on the "already" whilst we kept the "not yet" at bay. We
broke into the midnight celebration of Christ’s birth. We lingered, marvelled
and rejoiced at the birth of our salvation. In fact, we took the appropriate
posture of silence before the manger of the helpless Child Jesus. Our silence allowed
the mystery of God made Man to emerge.
This third
instalment will cover the significance of what is traditionally called the Mass
at Dawn. Originally, this was the Mass of St Anastasia because her feast was
kept on 25th Dec. She, amongst all martyrs, enjoyed the distinction, unique
in the Roman liturgy, of having a special commemoration in the second Mass of
Christmas. Gradually, the focus shifted from her to Christ. Thus, the liturgy
now continues
with the story of the birth of Jesus as found in Luke's Gospel where we find the
shepherds making their way to visit the infant Jesus.
In
connexion with the second instalment homily, I would like to draw your
attention to a particular feature of the crib. It is the presence of two
animals. It is to St Francis of Assisi that we credit the origin of the Crib.
He directed that these animals be placed therein. “I wish in full reality to awaken the
remembrance of the child as he was born in Bethlehem and of all the hardship he
had to endure in his childhood. I wish to see with my bodily eyes what it meant
to lie in a manger and sleep on hay, between an ox and a donkey”.
In our
continuing silence before Christ born in a manger, what significance do the ox
and the donkey have? They are not found in any story of the New Testament.
Instead they become our link to the Old Testament. According to Isaiah 1:3,
“The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib. Israel knows nothing,
my people understands nothing”. As such, their presence shows that there is
much more at stake than merely pious sentiments.
Accordingly,
Christmas night opens our eyes to recognise who our Saviour is. But do we?
Herod did not. In fact, Herod would try to do away with the Child. The scribes
and the Pharisees, ironically, those who were specialists in sacred scriptures
had failed to recognise Him who was the author of their learned field. The
Gospel of Luke today reveals the real oxen and donkeys: the shepherds, and soon
after, the wise men from Orient land and of course, Mary and Joseph. Furthermore,
the symbolism should not be missed that the Christ-Child, in between the two
draught animals, should be placed in a manger, no less a feeding trough. The
animal recognised that He who lay in a feeding trough would soon Himself become the feed or the food for the hungry. The Eucharistic connotation is quite
apparent in the placement of the Baby in a manger between the draught animals.[1]
But, failure
to recognise Christ the Saviour is quite easy. For us, who think we love Jesus,
it is easy to miss Him out in the Church, the community, the neighbour and the
ones closest to us, our relatives and family. It is easy to turn a blind eye to
Him with our smugness. Or when we become engrossed with our comfort zone, it is
easy to lose sight of who is important in salvation. Finally, many of us have mistaken
facts as wisdom, blinded as we are by the availability of information that we
have lost a sense of wonderment of the mystery of the God-made-man.
Last night,
way past our midnight Mass, a server thanked me for the “brevity” of the homily
but he added that it lacked the “oomph”. My response to him was that he had
missed the point. It was supposed to be simple and without "oomph" because the
event spoke for itself—God spoke most definitively through His Word—the Christ.
Human words can never measure up to the Word. So, Christmas is the time to ask
God to grant us the grace of that simplicity of heart so that like the ox and
the donkey, we may recognise God Almighty in the Child Jesus, as St Francis of
Assisi did whenever he contemplated a crib.
[1] It challenges us today if we understand whom we are receiving at
Holy Communion. The irreverence is symptomatic of a kind of ignorance that
requires so much more catechising if we were to defeat it.
