How Christmas changes everything

Homily for Christmas Eve 2024

Loughrea St. Brendan's Cathedral West Aisle Window Saint Joseph and Child by Michael Healy, lower panel (photo: Andreas F. Borchert, Wikimedia Commons)

One Friday morning, several years ago, I awoke from a dream about an old friend from my college days with a strong impression that I should pray for my friend, and specifically that I should offer my Friday penance for him. So I did, and I probably would have forgotten all about it if I hadn’t happened on Sunday morning to talk to my friend, who told me that on Friday he was in a catastrophic accident: sideswiped by a large cargo truck, his car totaled. Praise God, my friend walked away from that accident without a scratch.

Coincidence? Perhaps. I suspect not. I might be wrong. I’m not by any means the kind of person who typically sees heavenly messages in dreams, but in this case it seems reasonable to feel that this dream might be something more. Of course, it’s no big deal either way. If it was a coincidence, no harm done: I was going to do the Friday penance anyway, and it was no special hardship to me to pray for my friend.

How very different Saint Joseph’s situation was! He had thought he knew what God wanted: He was going to marry this young woman, but then what he thought he knew was upended by this unexpected pregnancy. He thought long and hard about it—and once again he thought he knew what he should do. It was for the best, he believed, that he and Mary should quietly part ways. He hadn’t reached that decision lightly.

And then came this dream, this message—or was it a message? To Mary the angel came and spoke openly, in the waking world. Joseph had a dream. People dream things. Joseph was a just man, a man of God, but a man who struggled and doubted like any of us. A decision like this was no easier for him to make than it would be for you or me.

But Joseph had cultivated closeness with God. He was attentive to the divine voice. The idea that his own best judgment about what he ought to do might not be right was not unthinkable to him. He was able to say: I might be wrong. And he was ultimately willing to reorganize his life around a message in a dream that he discerned was no ordinary dream. Not just once, but repeatedly, moving his family from Bethlehem to Egypt in response to a dream, and then, after another dream, moving them back again from Egypt to Israel, to Nazareth in Galilee—all in response to special dreams.

At this point some people might get the impression that Joseph was always getting dreams telling him what to at every turn. Perhaps. I suspect not. I might be wrong. But how did Joseph and Mary wind up betrothed in the first place? Matthew doesn’t mention a dream for that one. And the way Joseph formed his plan to divorce Mary quietly—a decision that was not the right one, but that Matthew credits to his good character, his justice and his mercy—would he have formed that plan in the first place if God was always telling him everything in dreams and he had already been told in a dream to marry this young woman?

I suspect that Joseph was betrothed to Mary because he had come to believe, correctly, that it was God’s will—without a special dream from heaven. Most of the important decisions in Joseph’s life I suspect he made in much the same way that we all make decisions in keeping with our character and beliefs, our goals and our responsibilities, and, hopefully, our relationship with God. In which case it was the closeness with God, the attentiveness to the divine voice, that Joseph cultivated in his ordinary decisions that enabled him on these extraordinary occasions to recognize when a dream was more than just a dream.

How do we cultivate closeness to God, intimacy with God, in our lives? How can we learn to be, like Joseph, attentive to the divine voice?

Above all, we must understand that intimacy with God begins, not with us, but with God: God with us, Emmanuel. Christmas changes everything. Christ in the manger; Christ on the cross; Christ on the altar; Christ in his community of faith, his Church; Christ in your neighbor, in the person sitting next to you; Christ in you. God in the flesh has come to us. Christmas changes everything. Even for Joseph, who had cultivated intimacy with God, Christmas changed everything.

For some of you who are parents—and parenthood is different for everyone, and whether or not we’re parents, many of us have had experiences in some way like this, but for some parents—there’s a moment, perhaps when your firstborn arrives and is with you, in your arms. And you loved your unborn child, from the whoosh of the heartbeat on the monitor to the black-and-white ultrasound images to the kicking. You loved that unborn child—but then the child arrives and is really with you, and suddenly you feel like, “Oh. I thought I loved you before. This changes everything.”

Experiences like that are like a dim reflection of God’s gift to all of us on Christmas, from Joseph and Mary to you and me. Emmanuel: God with us. Christmas changes everything.

Do you want friendship with Christ? Do you want to hear his voice? That desire is already a response to his call. Jesus is the one who desires you and calls to you. Even our desire for him is Jesus’ gift to us.

How do we cultivate intimacy? Like closeness with anyone else, it’s significantly a matter of time and trust. In regard to time, as a newborn baby takes over your life, our relationship with God transforms how we live, day in and day out. We must spend time with our Lord: in prayer, in spiritual reading, in community with one another. Coming to Mass every week is a good start, but we need more time with the Lord. And, in regard to trust, very often our plans for our life will not be the way that God wants to lead us, or simply the way life goes. Such times can try our faith. Can we trust God when it’s hard? Can we say to God about our own plans, our own ideas, “I might be wrong”?

Words from a Christmas prayer in a homily by Pope St. John Paul II:

O Holy Night, so long awaited, which has united God and man for ever! You rekindle our hope. You fill us with ecstatic wonder. You assure us of the triumph of love over hatred, of life over death.

For this reason we remain absorbed in prayer.

In the luminous silence of your Nativity, you, Emmanuel, continue to speak to us. And we are ready to listen to you. Amen!