The sacrifice of love of Jesus would not stop there.  He would sacrifice himself through his readiness to face distrust, opposition, hatred and even unjust punishment on a Cross.  A touching and imaginative Spanish carol has the naked Christ Child seeking shelter in a humble household. When the matron asks him his parentage and his place of origin, he answers “My Father is of heaven, my mother as well. I came down to earth so as to suffer.”  He has come to suffer out of love,  to be with us out of love.  To show us the real value our humanity God became human without ceasing to be God.  And through his holy humanity He has shown us what the greatest kind of love is.

What is more, He has taught us the value of family, of ordinary work, of friendship, of noble social customs, of solidarity with the suffering and the needy.  He has enabled us to see that pain, discomfort, toil, loss, and poverty are not the ultimate evils – each of these can be turned to good in the lives of men and women.  Each of these can be purifying, drawing us to the higher truths and the greater good.  The great evil is sin – the deliberate turning away from God and his loving will. Yet Jesus has come precisely to save us from sin and bring us to eternal life and happiness.

Christmas is not just a feast for children.  It is for everyone. We cannot possibly outgrow it.  Instead we must continually rediscover it and deepen in its meaning for us. It is a day and a season to contemplate the face of Christ, to learn to love God more deeply – God made man – and to know that he saves us from all that we fear and from that can definitively harm us.

May we all have a really joyful and contemplative Christmas!

In just a few days we will celebrate this unique and amazing event.  We will celebrate as Christians before a still largely unbelieving, even largely unknowing world. The good news preached by Paul and the other apostles, and by men and women of faith over the course of centuries, has still not reached every corner of the world.  It has still not touched the lives and hearts of millions.  Christians – practicing or not practicing – represent a minority, albeit a large one, of the world’s population. It should be our ambition to keep spreading this knowledge of God and of his Christ – to broadcast the secret and reveal the mystery.

Now just as we attribute to the Holy Spirit, the third Divine Person, the “Incarnation” (the Son becoming man), so also we see the spreading of this knowledge as falling to Him. If we are more devoted to the Holy Spirit, if we often end up asking Him to help us know what to say and how to say it, we will succeed in drawing others to Christ and to His Church.

The Church is missionary by nature, we have been told by an important document of the Second Vatican Council. That means all of us are meant to be, in some way or another, ambassadors of the Saviour of the world.  Clergy find themselves called, like St Paul, to be “broadcasters” of the Christian message.  Laity spread Christian truth and its spirit in multiple ways.  Those who are privileged enough to be involved in education or academia, the media, the world of art, literature or entertainment can often thoughtfully and attractively weave Christian ideals and insights into their work.  Any profession or occupation that is honest in itself provides opportunities for Christian witness, through acting justly and virtuously, working well and taking an interest in those one serves and works with. The social and family life of men and women gives occasion for meaningful conversations, good advice, encouragement and care with the charity that the example and grace of Christ enable us to show.  All of this is to be “on mission” , reaching out to others that they may come to love God and embrace the salvation Jesus offers.

Christians should be known not only for their perseverance in doing good, their resistance of the temptations of pride and of the flesh, and their allegiance to God, but also for their hopeful, serene and cheerful approach to life overall.

As those who believe in Christ we know that the victory over life’s evils, whether physical, mental or moral, lies with Him.  We are convinced that Jesus shows us the way to the real perfection and fulfilment of our humanity. We do not want to short-change Christianity by acting as if our religion is all just a burden, or a sacrifice of life’s pleasures and human achievements. There is so much in the world that it is legitimate to enjoy, and often the simplest realities give the most authentic joy. A life well-lived presents its own difficulties, it is true, and sacrifice is often called for, just as Jesus tells us:  “ If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”   However, what Christ teaches us is the liberation from what could chain us down -  a mire of trivial pursuits, all selfish and, in the end, ungratifying or even depressing.

There is a certain joy one can experience in conquering one’s laziness or some bad habit, leaning on God’s grace. There is the joy one at times feels when we have managed to attend successfully to someone’s need. There is the joy of asking God’s forgiveness in the sacrament of confession, and knowing that we have, in fact, been forgiven and can begin again. Just the same, we do not need to “feel” elated or overly consoled to find greater peace in our lives, even as certain sufferings persist.  As St Josemaria recorded in a point of The Way:  “The cheerfulness you should have is not the kind we might call physiological good spirits — the happiness of a healthy animal. You must seek something more: the supernatural happiness that comes from the abandonment of everything and the abandonment of yourself into the loving arms of our Father-God”(659).

He also said that “sad” virtue was no virtue at all.  He was emphasizing something St Teresa of Avila had written centuries ago to her sisters in religious life: “A sad nun is a bad nun,” she said. “I am more afraid of one unhappy sister than a crowd of evil spirits….What would happen if we hid what little sense of humour we had? Let each of us humbly use this to cheer others.”

May we be known for our self-giving, our detachment from merely material things, and our piety but also for our good spirits, our cheerful faces and our good way of reacting to the little setbacks of life.  We should often think of what Virgin Mary must have been like in day to day life and what it would feel like to be with her.  Elizabeth had that experience when Mary came to visit her and said “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour!”

St Mary’s is an historically significant church, home to Archbishops Daniel Mannix and Justin Simonds when each was coadjutor, and it remains an important landmark in the City of Melbourne. In recent years St Mary’s has been rejuvenated, becoming a cultural centre for sacred art and music, whose doors are open everyday to the public.

But time has taken its toll on the mellow sandstone exterior of the church. In response to the deterioration of the internal and external fabrics of the building, the restoration of this unique church began in 2004 and continues to the present time. St Mary’s is a heritage-listed building and its restoration has received the recognition and involvement of the National Trust of Australia, which manages the restoration account. The restoration has received important funding from the federal and state governments totalling $2.5 million.

While first-time visitors to St Mary’s are often overawed by the glory of its fully restored interior, there is still a great deal of restoration and conservation work to do on the church’s exterior. The total cost for completion of the restoration is $8.5 million. We have $2 million left to raise — a sum that requires donations both large and small. View the three-part short film in this section to get a sense of what St Mary’s restoration has already achieved, and what still needs to be done.

It is unlikely that John ever lived in complete isolation from others, though it definitely seems he reacted against the most typical influences of the times.  His was a very independent way of life, no doubt seeking long periods of being on his own, praying and reflecting, meditating on the Scriptures. The “wilderness”  would not have been a sandy desert in the way we normally imagine.  Rather, it must have been the rocky environment of sparse vegetation west of the Dead Sea in Judea. Somehow John managed to survive there on his meagre diet of locusts and wild honey.

What also stands out about John is his single-mindedness in preparing himself and others to recognize the Messiah when he would make his appearance.  Whereas other prophets foretold Christ’s coming from a long way away in time (like Isaiah in the passage that is the first reading of today’s Mass), the Baptist’s mission was to point to his imminent arrival.  This partly explains why the Church brings him into the liturgy of the early part of Advent.  He is asking us to get ready for Christ’s coming, -  “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” -  the celebration of which is imminent.  He is also reminding us of Jesus’ Second Coming, with the purifying fire that St Peter tells us will separate the good from the evil and transform the whole of creation.

Advent will pass quickly.  We want to greet Our Lord at the celebration of his birth with our souls in good stead. “What sort of persons ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God”(2 Peter 3:11).  We do not need to imitate the kind of life John the Baptist lived, but we should learn from his example of detachment and single-mindedness.  Advent calls us, like John, to repentance of the selfishness, pride, laziness and sensuality that sometimes dominate our lives.  It calls us to single-minded dedication to God – his truth and his grace. At Mass we begin making an act of contrition for how we may have sinned “in my thoughts and in words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do.”  When we make our Christmas sacramental confession through the mediation of the priest, – or any confession for that matter – we go make stronger this act of repentance, calling on Our Lord to enter deeper into our lives and cleanse our behaviour.  Confession is a kind of renewal of our Baptism.  Like Christian Baptism, it is potentially more effective than the Baptism of John.  It really makes Christ to be re-born within us.