“He sacrificed himself for us in order to set us free from all wickedness and to purify a people so that it could be his very own and would have no ambition except to do good.”  Jesus is born for us.  Jesus is truly our Saviour.  The second reading of the midnight Mass captures these words of St Paul that bring home to us the real meaning of Christmas.  This is a day of great joy for all men and women who have come to know that not only is there a solution for all of life’s challenges, sorrows and enigmas but this solution is given to us by God sacrificing himself out of love for us. It is given by God “emptying himself”, as St Paul says elsewhere, that is by God the Son taking upon himself the limitations of our humanity, our created nature. He has become one with us.  He has immersed himself in human history.  He has become an infant born of a woman – Mary of Nazareth.  He has become part of a family – an extended family.  He has learned to work with his hands, the hands of a carpenter – an apprentice to his guardian father Joseph.  He has rubbed shoulders with the citizens of a town not really known for its friendliness, or its religious life and good morality.  As Nathaniel commented pointedly to Philip years later – “Can anything good come out of that place?”  He was speaking of Nazareth.

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!