Merry Christmas! That was the Christmas story according to St. John. You notice the four Gospels have different emphases. Different ways of reflecting on this wonderful mystery of Who Jesus is, and they start at different places. Mark starts his Gospel talking about the baptism of the Lord, the first manifestation of the Trinity. When Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, the Spirit descends; the Father's voice is heard. Jesus is commissioned to go out and do His act of saving us. Matthew and Luke start earlier. They include the wonderful story of the Angels, the Magi, the shepherds--pointing out that the mission didn't begin with the baptism, but from the moment of His birth He was heralded as the Messiah. But John takes it a step further. He goes back to the beginning. Jesus did not become the Messiah simply at His birth. The Son of God was with God from the very beginning. In fact before there was a beginning of the universe as we understand it He was there. He is the one who created all things. The Christmas Story of St. John in a certain way is the most majestic of the ones in terms of it proclaiming clearly the absolute divinity of the Lord Jesus, which seems pretty clear from the Scriptures anyway, but is particularly clear the way St. John lays it out in his prologue. John wants those who hear His Gospel to understand that what is happening is the new creation. That's why he patterns the beginning of his gospel on the beginning of the book of Genesis. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In the beginning God said "Let there be light, and there was light". But Jesus is the true light who enlightens all men. John contrasting that what people are witnessing is a new creation even more spectacular than the first creation. The first was a creation in nature. The second is a creation in super nature. A supernatural gift to us. Not simply to enable us to be human, but to enable us to be called Sons and Daughters of God. The cataclysm that destroyed the first creation, our fall, is restored by the coming of the second Adam, Jesus Himself, Who, by His saving death, restores the damage that the first Adam did. This enables us once again to know more perfectly the union with God that had always been His plan for us. The Wise Men understood that. The Angels clearly understood that. There's a variety of different ways that we have noticed and celebrated this great event. Last night I watched the Papal Mass from the Vatican, and it was a particular delight to see one of our own parishioners, Dan Jones, acting as the Deacon of the Papal Mass, chanting the Gospel, in front of the Pope and about forty million other people world wide. The commentator said that he asked Reverend Mr. Jones beforehand if he were nervous at doing this, at proclaiming the Gospel in front of the Pope and a gazillion people. Reverend Mr. Jones acknowledged that he was slightly nervous. He did a wonderful job proclaiming the Gospel in front of the Holy Father himself.

Even the commentators on the news momentarily forgot their political correctness and wished 'Merry Christmas'! Not 'Happy Holidays', 'Joyous Kwanzana' or anything else. "Merry Christmas'. Remembering exactly what it is we are celebrating. Christmas! The title in English is particularly wonderful. Most of the titles for this day in the other languages are some permutation on the Nativity of the Lord. But in English it's always been known as "The Mass of Christ". The Mass that begins the act of our redemption. The Mass that we celebrate how it starts for us. When Jesus is born, when He makes His way among us; when the Heavens, and the pagans and the peasants join together to proclaim exactly what's going on. There's a lot of confusion today about who Jesus is and what He knew about Himself. You may have seen from time to time the writings of what is called the Jesus Seminar. This groups conducts 'research' on exactly who Jesus was and what He knows and they seem to be concluding that He knew very little about hardly anything and that most of the Scripture is fake. This has to do with that ancient Biblical statement: 'in professing to be wise, they became fools.' Because what we know, what we have always known is Jesus knew exactly who He was. The baby in the cradle while He's looking up at the Wise Men is simultaneous conscious of the fact that His little finger is keeping the Milky Way spinning. When the Word became flesh, He didn't forget that He was God. His Divinity didn't just kind of go away for the next thirty years. Jesus of Nazareth became flesh, was full human, was fully God, and we have no earthly idea how that worked. But we know that it did. And we know that it happened precisely so that the Father could give us the most absolutely concrete demonstration of His love possible. Not simply to send us prophets who as eloquently as they could, like Isaiah and Hosea, and the author of Song of Songs, proclaim the Father's love and mercy to us. Not simply to do that, but to show us in a perfectly concrete way by having the Son become flesh, walk among us and tell us Himself of the Father's love and the Father's mercy. And then to see it perfectly acted out on the Cross, when as the great act of sacrifice He undoes the damage. He dies for us. He is the perfect reflection of the Father's love, and He enables us to be born not of the flesh, not of man's desiring it, but by the power of God, becoming children of God. The gift that Jesus gives us that we celebrate today we only glimpse in part. When we see Him face to face, when we stand before the throne of God and we recognize and experience concretely what the Father's and the Son's and the Spirit's love is really like; when it is pouring through our hearts with nothing in the way, when we see the glory of that epic vision then we will appreciate what Christmas and Easter is all about. Today we see as in a mirror darkly. We are grateful for what we experience of His love. The best is yet to come. But Jesus doesn't make us wait. Jesus invites us here and now to enter into the mystery of His becoming flesh, the mystery of His greatness.