Christmas Day, 25 December 2011, John 1:1-18

The Nativity

I was listening John Moriarty telling a story recently. He had introduced us to his niece, Amanda, earlier on in the story and now he brought her in again. This time it was Good Friday, and while Amanda's granny, John's mother, went to the Good Friday devotions, John and Amanda stayed at home to look after the cow that was calving. When they went out to check on the cow, they discovered that she had already begun to give birth to her calf. Amanda squealed when she saw the little hooves coming out the back of the cow. According to Amanda, this was wrong. The calf was coming out wrong! John enquired why, and Amanda declared that she herself had come out of her Mummy head first!

Eventually, after the calf had been safely born and the cow had carefully cleaned it, Amanda and John retreated back into the house where the story developed. John was curious to find out all that Amanda understood about where babies come from. Amanda told him that she had come from her Mummy's tummy. So, John enquired further: where did Mummy come from? Amanda thought for a minute. "From granny's tummy!" Then, the really hard one. Where did granny come from? Amanda was vexed. What answer could there be to this question? Eventually her furrowed brow changed into a smile. She had an answer: "Granny came from her own tummy!"

John mused for us about this. For Amanda, there was nothing or no-one before granny. Therefore granny was the beginning of everything. John was worried about this; he described Amanda as being vulnerable to experience. Eventually she would discover that her statement of fact was not true.

I think that John's line is a wonderful one. We are all vulnerable to experience. The facts that we hold dear can be demolished very easily and quickly.
Like the children in C.S. Lewis' Narnia series. In "The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe" the children are transported to Narnia where they meet Aslan, the lion. C.S. Lewis is famously known for his conversion to Christianity and the many talks and lectures he gave about Christianity. The children's stories of Narnia are replete with Christian references. Indeed some say that Aslan, the lion, is the figure of Christ in the stories. Aslan features in all the stories of Narnia. In "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" the children are suffering persecution and enter Narnia through a wardrobe full of fur-coats. When someone tries to follow them, they cannot. Imagination and wonder are the core values that are needed to make the journey to Narnia. It mimics the gospel where it says in Matthew: "unless you change and  become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:3)

This morning's gospel is kind of cryptic. It does not lend itself easily to listening and it is not the gospel story of Christmas and the Nativity that we hold so dear. No, rather this gospel from the beginning of John's gospel is just that: a beginning. Jesus is the Word, and "the Word was made flesh".

How are we to gain access to the Narnia of the gospel message of Christmas? How can we be like the little child and the little children that we celebrate this morning? How can we see beyond the limitations of our crisis-stricken world? We have to be changed. Christmas does not end today. Today is just the beginning. Enter into the joy and celebration of this day. But don't forget to push through the fur coats to tomorrow. Don't allow the 'facts' of your mind quosh the wonder of your imagination. Grant the Lord of all life permission to enter in.

Pope Benedict put it like this last night in St Peter's Basilica:

Today Christmas has become a commercial celebration, whose bright lights hide the mystery of God’s humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity.  Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this season, and to discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem, so as to find true joy and true light.

4 Sunday Advent, 18 December 2011, Luke 1:26-38

Tanner's 'Annunciation' (1898)

Homily for 'Do This in Memory' Mass. This is part of the parish's preparation of children who will receive Holy Communion in May 2012.

'Mary's Yes!'
Invite the children to locate a statue of the woman who is mentioned in this Sunday's Gospel.

Why do you think is Mary so important at this time of year?

In the Gospel, Mary said 'Yes' to God.
What would have happened if Mary had said 'No'?

• No Jesus
• No Christmas

But, she didn't say 'No'. Mary said 'Yes'!
And, because Mary said 'Yes', we will soon have a good reason to celebrate. What will that celebration be?

So, today we remember Mary and her 'Yes'.
We say thank you to Mary for saying yes.
We promise to love Mary and to honour her by praying her special prayer and by trying to live like Jesus wants us to.

What is Mary's special prayer?

Perhaps you might take time after Mass to light a candle and to pray the 'Hail Mary'.

3 Sunday Advent, 11 December 2011, John 1:6-8. 19-28

Gaudete Sunday

This Sunday we celebrate Gaudete Sunday. The word Gaudete comes from the Entrance Antiphon to today's Mass, "Rejoice, again I say to you, Rejoice". Today is the one time in the Church's year that the priest can wear rose coloured vestments. This Sunday we light the rose coloured candle on our Advent wreath. This Sunday is a Sunday of joy in the middle of what is otherwise a penitential season, a time of preparation for the feast of Christmas.

My generation, those born after Pope John Paul II visited Ireland, have never really known a Christmas without plenty. Plenty of presents, plenty of alcohol, plenty of food, plenty of money, even if it was borrowed money. There was plenty of everything. Our celebration of Christmas has been tied up with big parties, lots of new clothes, expensive presents handed around.

This Christmas is different though. Many people in our own community are taking a long hard look at their budget for this Christmas. Gone is the spendthrift attitude, gone is some of the festivity of yesteryear.

It is difficult to rejoice in the circumstances we find ourselves in. The places where we have sought the Christmas spirit are no longer open. We find ourselves approaching Christmas in a very different way, approaching Christmas in a new way.

We're challenged this year to dig deeper to answer the question: What is my reason for rejoicing this Advent as we prepare to greet the Christ-child this Christmas. As one phrase goes "Jesus is the reason for the season." Another one goes: "Lets put Christ at the heart of Christ-mas." Listening to the Ryan Tubridy yesterday morning on the radio, I was struck by a caller who rang in to share that he was going in to work to hand back his car, his phone and his laptop. Yesterday was his last day at work. As the conversation went on, I was amazed to hear the same caller tell us all that he was going to go bring his child into town yesterday afternoon to buy a toy for the SVP toy appeal. Here was a man losing his job in the face of Christmas and yet he was still willing to be generous and give. If this is not Christian, I don't know what is. This is putting Christ back into Christmas for me anyway.

This year, more than ever in the past decade and a half, we are being given a delicate opportunity to reflect on the reason for our rejoicing. We do not rejoice in expensive gifts, nice though they are. We do not rejoice in wasted food and drink. We do not rejoice in all the stuff of Christmas. We rejoice in the Emmanuel, in God become one of us.

We can choose to be depressed and blue about the circumstances of our world today. Or we can place our hope and trust in God who cared enough for each one of us to give us his Son.

"Rejoice in the Lord always, again, I say, Rejoice!"

2 Sunday Advent, 4 December 2011, Mark 1:1-8

A good friend of mine began his journey towards priesthood by reading the gospel that we have begun reading today: the gospel of Mark. Somebody handed him a copy of the gospel on it's own, a copy of this one gospel taken out of the rest of the Bible. He often told me about how he carried that gospel up into his bedroom, where no one else could see him, and he gradually read through it.

Good News!

Mark's gospel has been called the disciple's handbook, maybe because it is the shortest of the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. If you wanted to read the whole Bible, beginning with the gospel of Mark isn't a bad idea. You could easily read it in a couple of hours.

Reading the gospel transformed my friend's life. It led him to offering his own life as a priest to share the Good News with other people. In Mark's gospel, my friend encountered what the writer of the gospel intended, "the Good News about Jesus Christ, Son of God."

At the moment, we are journeying with a new translation of the Roman Missal, the book of prayer that we use in the Catholic Mass. We could say that we are, at the moment, 'Lost in Translation'. You see, all of the prayers that we use, all of the readings we listen to, are translations.

We might not be aware of it but, for example, the Old Testament was written first of all in Hebrew, the language of the People of Israel. Properly speaking, the Old Testament is called the Hebrew Bible. When the Israelites were expelled from their own land, they journeyed out into the greek speaking world. Eventually, they translated their Bible into greek for all of their people who were gathering to worship & pray in their synagogues.

For that reason, remembering that Jesus was a Jew, the first Christians wrote down the gospels in the primary language of their day: greek. When Christianity spread as far as Rome, and became more or less the State Religion of the Roman Empire in the third century, the Bible, and all the prayers of the Church were translated into Latin, because Latin was the official language of Law, of Business, and of Civic Life in ancient Rome.

It took almost twenty centuries, almost 2,000 years, for the Church to make the big leap to using the language of local people around the world for the Mass. And, so it was in 1965 that the first translations of the Roman Missal in English, Irish, and all the other languages of the world, began to be used at Mass. It would take another ten years, from 1965 to 1975 for a stable translation in English to be developed. This translation was in use up until last weekend when we made the momentous leap to using the newest translation of the Roman Missal in English. The story of translation is a core part of the story of Christianity.

To go back to the gospel of our Mass today. The word 'gospel' in English is a word that we associate with Church. The word gospel is not really used outside of Church, and where it might be used it is automatically associated with all things 'churchy'. The word 'gospel' is a translation of the greek word, 'evangelion'. From evangelion we get the familiar word: 'evangelise'. But the word 'evangelion' in contemporary English means 'good news' or 'glad tidings'. So, to evangelise means to share with others the good news that we have already heard ourselves. The gospel is literally 'good news'.

The story of Jesus is The story of Good News – and this evangelion – this good news, is a story that we cannot put down once we pick it up. It is a story that promises to change and shape our lives in ways that we may wish it didn't.

The 'good news' will evangelise us, but only if we want to be evangelised. And to be evangelised means to be absorbed by the story of Jesus and ultimately to encounter the Lord in a profound and personal way in prayer, in the Sacraments and in the broken Community of Faith that the Church is. Pope Benedict put it like this in his first homily as Pope:

... Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him. The task of the shepherd, the task of the fisher of men, can often seem wearisome. But it is beautiful and wonderful, because it is truly a service to joy, to God’s joy which longs to break into the world. ...

www.vatican.va

Don't let the good news be lost in translation. Very often we assume that our experience of Church, our experience of faith, our experience of God, is all that there is. Our hearts and our minds are not open to the possibility of being evangelised, not because we are bad, but because we become used to religion in the way that it seems it always has been. We know that religion is no subsitute for the personal encounter with Christ that Pope Benedict speaks about.

It is never too early, and it is never too late to be evangelised. It was as a teenager that I really encountered the good news of Jesus, even though I had been baptised and confirmed and went to Sunday Mass with my family long before that. The real encounter with Jesus led me to where I am today as a happy human being, as a happy priest. And the first task of this priest, and all priests, is not to 'say Mass' but to share "the Good News about Jesus Christ, the Son of God."