Jesus Has Come!

It’s funny how much we think about what’s missing at Christmas time: friends and family who aren’t here, things in our lives that didn’t come to pass, things that did and left us feeling empty. It can leave you feeling like a bit of a Grinch if you don’t feel the holiday cheer. Sorrow, darkness, anxiety – the opposite of the Christmas story, no?

The Nativity stories tell us that this is precisely what Christmas is. Christmas is about a woman scared of what is to come; about a man who doesn’t understand what has happened; about lonely shepherds in a field; about a difficult and dangerous journey undertaken at someone else’s whim; about a couple desperate to find a place to bear their child. Our sad and empty feelings are exactly the place in which the Christmas message appears.

These last weeks, we’ve been calling on God in our prayers to return and rule the world, to free us from darkness and pain – our Advent prayers expect us to be experiencing these difficult feelings. Sorrow, waiting, hope. Waiting in joyful hope for the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The joyfulness is in the hope, and not necessarily in the lives we’ve been living.

Our community in particular has experienced a great deal of loss and sadness. We’re faced with the reality that none of us will be getting our Christmas hug this year. Forty days ago, we celebrated our first Mass after Father died, some of us learning for the first time that God had taken him from us the morning before. Forty days we’ve been in the desert. What have we been preparing for? What, like Elijah, have we been calling for? Where have be been journeying to, if not the promise of the Lord?

Today is the forty-first day: today, as our Savior is born for us, we are coming out of the desert. Tonight we light candles in the darkness and see anew in the glow of that flame.

That promise – that light in the darkness – is fulfilled, the answer given to us in the Nativity story. Although Mary is troubled and afraid, so scared of what will happen to her that she hides at her cousin’s house for three months, she accepts God’s promise and is given a beautiful baby boy. Joseph, who is angry and confused, listens to the message of an angel and enters into the greatest story ever told. The shepherds are gathered together amid tidings of great joy. The Holy Family makes it safely to Bethlehem. In their hour of need, God provides through the kindness of a stranger.

We, too, experience this amazing love and joy, this great gift of light. And it isn’t because we’ve forgotten our sadness, or because we’ve left it behind and no longer feel it, but because God’s promise is fulfilled in the midst of it. Christmas is about those feelings, that sorrow, darkness and anxiety, and about how God embraces those feelings – those moments – in something greater. A light so great that the darkness did not comprehend it.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.