Family Ties

The Vigil of Christmas

What a God we have!

We have been anticipating the coming of Christ into our lives these past four weeks. Tonight we hear the promise fulfilled. Emmanuel. God is with us. But what kind of a God do we have who felt it necessary to come as he did, or to even come at all? And what kind of people are we that we are so very loved?

Every year at this vigil Mass we hear the long genealogy of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel. Matthew chose to begin his gospel with this genealogy to show his listeners that Jesus is the promised messiah, the Son of David who has come to set Israel free. Matthew wanted to show the royal lineage of Jesus, but he also wanted his listeners to see the humanity of Jesus, to relate to him as a man. Because Jesus is just like us, and we are just like him. He is a king, but he is also a beggar. He is exalted on high, but still has all the baggage of the past we all seem to carry around with us.

God has chosen to get right down with us in the dirt. He chose the method of salvation for the human race from the very moment human nature failed. He chose his people, and he chose a specific family line to be born into. God chose to be so very close to us that he shared our very human lives with us. God has chosen to insert himself into our everyday lives, just where we are. God chose to share in our humanity, with all its ups and downs, love and violence, joy and pain. He could have inserted himself in history at any point in that long genealogy. He could have been born a prince in any one of those royal households. But he chose instead to be born of a very poor young girl in a very poor village in a backwater province in a forgotten country. In a stable. In the dirt, where most people spend their time.

You can’t pick your family, but Jesus did. And the family he picked is just like any other family. In it are some of the greatest figures in Jewish history, and also some of the most reviled. There are kings and adulterers, wise men and murderers, heroes and harlots. They lived in times of plenty and times of want, times of peace and times of war. For the most part life was a great turmoil for them, and they struggled to keep sight of the hand of God guiding their lives. Just like us. We have all sorts of folk in our families. Both saints and sinners. And they’re all coming for Christmas dinner. We may or may not like them very much, but they’re our family, and we’re all in this together.

We all go through times of joy and times of turmoil. We are buffeted by the events of our days, and we sometimes wonder if God is really there for us. Is there at all. At times of struggle we sometimes think that God has distanced himself from us. We look hard but cannot find him. Sometimes we hide him ourselves, covering up his presence in a mountain of inconsequential stuff. The routine of our lives, the quest for more and more material goods, our own personal pain and suffering. But if you look at Matthew’s genealogy, look at the lives of the people in Jesus’ history, it is at the times of greatest peril that God has been most strongly present. He has always been there when we needed him most. It is out of our most challenging times that our greatest saints emerge.

What a God we have, who came to save his people from their sins. He came to offer us a glimpse of heaven. He came to show us that no matter what we’re going through, there is always hope. There is always forgiveness. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel. Because no matter what unsavory characters were among Jesus’ ancestors, no matter what horrible wars and exile and famine and death they had to endure, at the end there’s Jesus. In the end there’s always Jesus.

Well I hope you can see that the first Christmas was anything but idyllic, anything but perfect, anything but comfortable. I do not deny that there is a place for sentimentality but, truth be told, our sentimentality often sets us up for disappointment. We want Christmas to be Hallmark perfect. And then Uncle Joe shows up at Christmas dinner drunk, and son Ben is away in Iraq, Mom died last June, and instead of snow, it is warm. But guess what. Jesus wasn’t found in a perfect Christmas either. If you’re looking for a perfect Christmas, Jesus is not there. He is in the imperfect one. He’s in your actual Christmas not your imagined Christmas.

Find him there.