The true joy and peace of Christmas

Rejoice you just (Ps 33:1); it is the birthday of the Justifier.  Rejoice, you who are weak and sick; it is the birthday of the Savior, the Healer.  Rejoice, captives; it is the birthday of the Redeemer.  Rejoice, slaves; it is the birthday of the one who makes you lords.  Rejoice, free people; it is the birthday of the one who makes you free. Rejoice all Christians; it is the birthday of Christ. …
Rightly (did) the prophets foretell that he would be born, while the heavens and the angels announced that he had been.  The One who holds the world in being was lying in a manger; he was simultaneously speechless infant and Word.  The heavens cannot contain him, yet a woman carried him in her bosom. … May he bring his gifts to perfection in us, since he did not shrink from making his own our tiny beginnings; and may he make us into children of God, since for our sake he was willing to be made a child of man.

Written more than 1,600 years ago by a young bishop in North Africa, Augustine of Hippo, these words from a Christmas homily live as vividly today as they did then.  Augustine’s time was not so unlike our own.  It was an era of social confusion, military conflict and competition from a still vigorous pagan Roman past.  The Great Persecution had ended just 80 years earlier with Constantine’s Edict of Toleration.  The feast of Christmas was young.  The cult of Sol Invictus—the Unconquerable Sun, celebrated at the winter solstice—offered a very different way of doing “the holidays.”  It fell to Augustine to remind his people what their baptism implied for the way they lived, who the True God was, and why the incarnation of Jesus Christ had changed the whole direction of human affairs, and charged it with new and permanent joy.

Christmas is a good time to look back in gratitude on our own lives, on the love within our families, and on the witness of all those many believers, down through the centuries, who came before us.  History teaches us two things.  First, it never really repeats itself.  For Jews and Christians, history is not a cycle of recurring events.  It’s a line leading to some end point of meaning in the future.  Therefore, every human generation is unique and unrepeatable, with new knowledge, new abilities and different circumstances. But second, history also teaches us that while the world constantly changes, human nature doesn’t change.  Events may not repeat themselves; but our habits of thought, behavior, virtue and sin certainly do, because the human heart, as Augustine famously put it, is restless until it rests in God.  Our hunger for something more, something higher, in other words, our hunger for the joy of knowing God, is hardwired into who we are.

This week’s Denver Catholic Register is dated Dec. 23—the final day of Advent, and the last day of the seven beautiful and ancient Christian prayers we call the O Antiphons.  The antiphon for today reads: O Emmanuel, king and lawgiver, desire of the nations, Savior of all people, come and set us free, Lord our God.

Let’s lock that prayer in our hearts.  This year, let’s remember that Christmas means vastly more than the noise and flash of “the holidays,” or some generic nod to peace and good will.  Christmas is about the birth of Jesus Christ.  There is no real peace without him.  And he alone is our joy.  God became man, so that we might possess God.  That’s worth celebrating.

May God bless each of you and your families, fill you with his presence throughout this Christmas season, and surround you with his joy in the coming year!