midnight mass

‘Glory to God in the Highest and on earth peace.’

I have a friend who never reads anything but newspapers through  out the whole year. Except at Christmas he reads Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. One of my favourite extracts from the book is the part where Ebenezer Scrooge’s very good natured nephew calls in at Scrooges office in the City of London. Its Christmas Eve and  Scrooge is still working at his books and his accounts. His nephew has called to invite his  uncle to spend Christmas day with him. The invitation is rebuffed with a ‘Bah, humbug!’. Indeed says Scrooge Christmas itself is ‘Humbug’.

Scrooge’s cold hearted cynicism elicits a response from his nephew about Christmas. He says this: ‘I am sure that I have always thought of Christmas time - apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin- as a good time, a kind forgiving, pleasant, charitable time, the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut up hearts freely and to think of other people. And therefore though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe it has done me good and will do me good and I say, God bless it.’

You could put all of that down to Victorian sentimentality reminiscent of those Victorian scenes you sometimes see on Christmas cards. Men in top hats and women in long gowns trudging through the snow to church on Christmas day. But actually the message of A Christmas Carol  is a great deal stronger than that. It is about ethical and moral transformation. Scrooge is changed by the Christmas message of peace and goodwill. That was the message proclaimed to the shepherds and through them to all the world. Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace and goodwill.

How can we carry that message from Christmas  and make it our own to enrich our own lives and the life of the world around us? For the world is in greatest need of that peace of which the angels sang. And so are we. The peace that we all long for is on different levels. At the personal level we long for peace in our lives. For we all have our personal issues to face up to which disturb our peace. Wounds from fractured or broken relationships. Guilt at things said and done or not said and done. Grief at the death of a loved one. We are concerned about the effects of the economic crisis upon us and our families – and upon those most vulnerable in our society.

The world into which Jesus was born 2,000 years ago was a world torn apart by oppression and poverty. It’s little different today. War and the threat of terror fester on the world scene. We long for our troops to come home from Afghanistan. We  grieve for those who never will, and for their families. Where can we find the peace that we long for? It is the peace of which the angels sang across the barren fields of Bethlehem on the night of the Lord's birth. Glory to God in the Highest and on earth.... Peace.

In 1990 at the height of the violence in Northern Ireland a great woman, Mary Robinson, was elected as the president of the Irish Republic. In her inaugural address in Dublin Castle she placed the search for peace at the heart and centre of her leadership. She spoke about the fifth province. This is what she said: ‘As everyone knows there are only four geographical provinces on this island. The fifth province is not anywhere here or there. It is a place within each of us. That place that is open to the other. That swinging door which allows us to venture out and others to venture in. The fifth province is the human heart.’

The search for peace begins and ends within  each one of us. If peace is not found in the heart of each one of us then it will not be found in the world in which we live. St Luke is very careful to tell us that Jesus was born during the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. Augustus was a great politician and a great propagandist who had persuaded the Roman Republic to make him the first emperor of Rome. And his winning ticket was the promise of peace. And for a time the Pax Romana prevailed. The Peace of Rome was established. But not always and not everywhere.

St Luke tells us that the angels sang of the advent of peace and goodwill at the birth of Jesus. In other words he was saying that if you are looking for peace from Augustine and the like then you will be disappointed – for they cannot change hearts. This is the birth of the one who is called the Prince of Peace and the Son of God. He is the one whose birth  can bring that peace to our hearts and lives  and it is from there that all peace originates.

Writing on the Feast of The Nativity of the Lord, Queen Elizabeth I wrote this: ‘Were Christ the Son of God a thousand times born in Bethlehem, yet never once  born in my heart, then it were to no avail’. Those words of Queen Elizabeth point to ability of Jesus Christ to transform our lives from within. The Christ who lay in the manger at Bethlehem can live in our hearts and transform our lives and in transforming our lives can begin to transform the world.

That fifth province of which Mary Robinson spoke, the human heart, your heart and my heart, your life and my life, is capable of being transformed by God through his Son if we allow him. The peace for which we long can be ours if we really want it. Christ will live in our hearts if we ask him to, if we find room for him. If he is born in us and reborn in us day by day his presence will transform our lives. For he is the Son of God come to live amongst us and to take possession of our hearts and lives: "Blessed art thou, O Christmas Christ, that thy cradle was so low that shepherds, poorest and simplest of earthly folk, could yet kneel beside it, and look level eyed into the face of God’.

That is the true glory of Christmas. The heart of its message. Indeed the heart of what the Christian faith has to offer to us. That God the creator of all that is came to his world in the child born of Mary. And will come to us day by day, take possession of our hearts and lives and fill us with his peace. Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to all.