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Hardly a day has gone by in the past month or so without John Lennon’s Happy Christmas playing on a local radio station as part of its “holiday favorites” promotion. I don’t consider myself a fan of John Lennon, but I do appreciate things and thoughts that tie in so well with the meaning of Christmas. Lennon’s song echoes a perennial question: why hasn’t the birth of our Savior been able to overcome the trials and sorrows of this world? “For weak and for strong, for rich and for poor ones, the road is so long,” he sings. His question reaches back to one of the many misconceptions to which many people have clung over the ages. If the Redeemer has come, why the continued misery and pain that we as humans have endured? In the Gospel of Luke, which we will hear both at midnight and dawn on Christmas Day, we find the answer: Jesus was born of woman; He endured the trials of poverty; He lived as we live and He experienced humanity in its fullness. He came to bring life. He came to free us from sin and death. It was not to the great and powerful – the symbols of success and earthly comfort – to whom Jesus came, but to a poor carpenter and his wife. It was not to the great and powerful that the news of His birth was first revealed, but to “shepherds in that region living in the fields, and keeping the night watch over their flock.” It was not the worldly and influential whom He would gather to Himself to accomplish his mission, but a group of fishermen, tax collectors, laborers and social outcasts. Through Luke, we learn that the promise of redemption, of salvation, comes because Our Lord readily shared and accepted our humanity. His was a life not of leisure or privilege, but of hard work, persecution and want. It is a life that many of us have been fortunate enough not to know personally, but which we so clearly know exists in other parts of the world, and right here in our midst, a challenge which as disciples we are charged to help meet In the Gospel of John, which we read during Mass on Christmas Day, we hear “What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
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