December 24, 2024 Christmas Eve, morning
H O M I L Y
Almost 40 years ago, in 1987, in Rome, Pope John Paul II received the visit of the Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I from Constantinople. Like the visit between Paul VI and Athenagoras in Jerusalem, some twenty years before, it was the encounter between two great and warm human beings. At the moment of departure, they stood for about ten minutes near the car that would bring Dimitrios to the airport, like two friends who cannot let go of each other, and Patriarch Dimitrios' last words were: " we have found in you a man, and we will be the messenger of your humility". In his official speech, he had said that he had come to share with Rome their respective spiritual traditions and riches. Now, at the end, he says: "we have met a man"; and I think it was the most beautiful thing he could say.
Today we celebrate the human birth of God. God chose to become a human being, in order to reveal to us all the grandeur and the beauty of humanity as he had planned it. He does not want us to be gods or even angels. He wants us to be human beings, to be authentic men or women, as he has made us, at his own image.
The face of humanity has been scarred and deformed by many wars: wars between nations, between families, between individuals. Wars within each one of us, between the reign of God and the powers of evil. War between our need to love and to be loved and our fears that often engender resentment or perhaps at times even hatred.
Jesus comes to us as the king of peace. He comes, as Zechariah says in the Benedictus that we sing every morning: "to shine on those who sit in darkness... to guide our feet into the way of peace." I like very much this image of God shining on us like the morning sun. The only way for us to become fully human, is to dare to expose ourselves to these rays of light and warmth.
And I will conclude these reflections with a poem by the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel ‑‑ a poem that a friend sent me for Christmas:
God
is unwilling to be alone
and humanity
cannot forever remain impervious
to what He longs to show.
Those of us who cannot keep their striving back
find themselves at times
within the sight of the unseen
and become aglow with its rays
Some of us blush,
others wear a mask.
Faith is a blush
in the presence of God.
(Abraham Joshua Heschel)