I’m sure you know that there are 12 Days of Christmas, but perhaps you don’t know that on some of these days we celebrate various important Feasts, each of which reminds us of some aspect of our Christian faith. You can see and hear me giving this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chBeJ1WsaUo
The first of these is on the 2nd Day of Christmas, when we celebrate the first Martyr St Stephen, reminding us that our life as a Christian can sometimes be hard and sacrificial. We might think of Good King Wenceslaus and his Page struggling through the snow to help a poor man on the Feast of Stephen. On the 3rd Day of Christmas, we celebrate St John the writer of the Gospel, who served God in a very different way by thinking and then writing about Jesus whom he knew better than anyone. We have that lovely bit in his 1st Letter “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands… that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you.”
But on the 4th Day of Christmas, we get a very different message, because this is the day when we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents, which commemorates that horrific act by King Herod, when he ordered his soldiers to slaughter all the boy babies under 2 years old in Bethlehem. Now first of all of course, it’s a powerful reminder of how close Jesus was to the evil and suffering of the world even as a tiny baby, and how much we need to pray for places where such evil is still happening; but the Church also says something strange about these slaughtered babies that I think we need to ponder on. In the Opening Prayer at Mass for that Day the Priest prays on our behalf, saying that these babies “Confessed and proclaimed God …. not by speaking but by dying.”
Now this is a bit of a challenge to our way of thinking about faith isn’t it, because it reminds us that God doesn’t need us for his presence to be proclaimed. It is very hard indeed to accept the suggestion that the horrific slaughter of innocent babies could proclaim the presence of God. I explain this to myself by thinking that what the Church is trying to say is that in God’s eyes no life is wasted, even one in which there is much suffering; and that what we think of as a total tragedy is nonetheless the immediate entry of these children into union with God, into eternal life. This reminds me of what I’m reading at the moment about the Life of St Teresa of Calcutta. I have got to the bit where we hear of Jacqueline, a laywoman who, without becoming one of Mother Teresa’s Sisters, worked alongside her caring for the poor in a town in India. But then an underlying physical problem forced her to travel back to Europe for treatment. and she discovered that she was not going to be cured and would have to stay in Europe facing permanent pain and never fulfilling her dream of returning to the work she believed she had been called to do. When she heard this, Mother Teresa wrote to Jacqueline asking her to be a prayer partner to the work, to offer her suffering and pain as part of her prayer. She did not mean by this that suffering and pain was the will of God, only that faced with such pain, Jacqueline should try to use it in some positive way, rather than spending her time thinking about it and feeling miserable.
We tend to think that what matters to God is what we do, even if what we do are only little acts of kindness and love; and we think that to be a great saint is to do something that is important or significant for our world. But here we’re being told that sometimes doing what appears to be nothing can be beautiful for God. So for example, once Mother Teresa handed a dying baby to one of her helpers. All she had to do was to hold that baby and rock it for several hours, so that the baby could be given comfort and love until it died.
Now let me explain what I think this has got to do with the Feast we celebrate today on the 8th Day of Christmas. The problem is that we take Mary’s title as the “Mother of God” for granted, using it every time we say the Hail Mary; but in fact in the early Church there were many who denied Our Lady that title. Led by a Bishop called Nestorius, they argued that it was right to call her the Mother of Christ, but not the Mother of God. St Cyril of Alexandria fought hard against this idea, because it implied that the baby in Mary’s womb was not fully God, that God was not fully present there. They suggested a number of alternatives : that Jesus was two separate halves and that Mary was only mother of the human half ; or that God could only be fully present in Jesus when he was actively involved in saving the world by his public life and teaching and his death and resurrection ; or that although Jesus was the closest to God that a man could be, he wasn’t ever fully God. In 431 AD at the Council of Ephesus, the Church decreed that St Cyril was right, and that Our Lady should be called the Mother of God, Theotokos in Greek, thereby making clear that God was fully present not just in the adult Jesus, but also just as much in Jesus both in her womb, then as a tiny helpless baby and then as a boy under the authority of his parents.
I hope you see now that the same point is being made : not just that God could act in his fullness in Jesus even when he was not active, but also that God can act in us even when we are not active. We heard from St Paul in our 2nd Reading that God has “Sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts” so that we have become his “Heirs.” (Gal 4:4-7) In the Roman world where many children even of the rich died, such people would sometimes adopt a young person who had survived as their heir. That person could then inherit vast estates and amazing amounts of money, without doing anything to deserve it. In the same way, says St Paul, in this remarkable passage, God has made us his heirs, and thus inheritors of the kingdom of heaven, even though we do not deserve it. St Paul says this in another way in his Letter to the Romans where he writes (5:8) “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The very existence of God, choosing to immerse himself in our human world, to become fully human in Jesus within Mary’s womb, this action by God, however feeble our response, has made all things new. Of course it is good if we do recognise this and respond to it, like St Stephen or St John; but nevertheless the light shines in the darkness and defeats the darkness whether we recognise it or not.
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