25 December 2024 - Mass of the Day
Isaiah 52:7-10; Hebrews 1:1-16; John 1:1-18
Homily
Jesus of Nazareth was a migrant, the son of a migrant.
One of the titles given to him in the Christian literature of the first centuries was precisely that of Stranger. He is the Stranger par excellence. He is even a stranger in his own home, because, as the Prologue to John's Gospel says, He came to his own people and his own people did not recognize him.
And if we pay any attention at all, we are surprised by the number of migrations mentioned in the opening chapters of Luke's Gospel.
Barely pregnant with Jesus, Mary leaves Galilee and hurries across the mountains of Judea to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is six months pregnant. A few months later, already several months pregnant herself, she had to cross these same mountains again to go to Bethlehem in Judea, in order to satisfy the whims of the Roman Emperor, who wanted to take a census of his kingdom and have everyone registered in the town of his ancestors.
As soon as Jesus was born, he had to flee to Egypt with his parents to avoid being killed by the paranoid old king, Herod. When Joseph returned to Judea with his family after Herod's death, he had to flee to Galilee because Archelaus, Herod's son, was more dangerous than his father. Each of these migrations is therefore caused by the whim or malice of a powerful person who crushes the weak. This has been the case for thousands of years, and today's migrations are also caused by the wars waged by the powerful on the backs of the weak and the small.
Already in the Old Testament, migration is at the heart of the history of Israel. This story begins when Abraham receives the order to leave his country, his land, his people, and go to a new and unknown land. Once he had settled in this land, he was visited by God in the form of three ‘strangers’, three migrants passing through, whom he welcomed into his tent. Then the Chosen People will experience exile in Egypt and will be migrants for forty years in the desert before entering the Promised Land.
There is, however, a migration of another kind, and a much more important one. This migration is the subject of today's solemnity. It is the migration of which Saint John speaks when he says that the Word was in God and that the Word was God and became flesh. It is also that of which Saint Paul speaks when he tells us that the Word dwelt in the fullness of the divinity, but that he stripped himself of the attributes of his divinity and became obedient to the point of death, and the death of the cross; then the Father exalted him.
After his death Jesus returned to his Father, but promised his disciples that he would return. And according to his great speech, recorded in the beautiful chapter 25 of Matthew, the judgement that will then be passed on each of us will be: ‘I was... a stranger and you took me in’ or ‘I was... a stranger and you did not take me in’...
Christmas is not just the anniversary of the birth of little Jesus. It's the celebration of God's humanity. It is the feast of the Son of God who became a migrant to come to us. The Incarnation is not simply the incarnation of God in a human being; it is the fact that all of humanity has been assumed by God. And Jesus, who identified himself particularly with all the little ones and the weak, and who himself experienced in his flesh the difficulties of migration, comes to us through all the migrants who still come to us today.
If chapter 25 of Matthew (‘you took me in... you did not take me in...’) is enough to make us tremble, let us listen to the words of the Evangelist John, the mystic with the piercing gaze, who tells us again, in the prologue to his Gospel: ‘He came to his own, and his own did not receive him... but to those who received him he gave the gift of becoming children of God.’
In reality, there is no salvation without migration. We cannot be saved without leaving ourselves to go towards others, with love and mercy, to allow God to come and make his home with us. For, in the end, it is not only the Son of God who makes himself a migrant, it is also his Father: ‘If anyone loves me,’ Jesus said, ‘he will keep my commandments. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.’
Yes, God will migrate to come to us, but only on condition that, faithful to his command, we open ourselves to all his children who come to us.
Armand Veilleux