To those
this with us this evening who are new to St. James, friends and family of
parishioners, on behalf of our pastor, Fr. Chuck Walker, and our entire staff I
welcome you to St. James and wish you a blessed and Merry Christmas! I hope that you will find our Church and our
parishioners to be warm and inviting and feel welcome to pray with us any
time. We are available to you and want
to help you maintain and grow in your faith.
We also want to help you get reacquainted with your faith if you haven’t
been to Mass in a while. Let us try our
hand at helping you answer a question or solve a problem that has been an
obstacle to you. We have a large and
active parish with prayerful and resourceful people with many helpful gifts and
talents all at your service… starting with this very Mass, the greatest help of
all.
One of the
most helpful parts of our Gospel reading tonight is the strong example of St. Joseph. It is Joseph who took Mary, pregnant with the
Son of God by the power of the Holy Spirit, to Bethlehem in order to register
in the census; it is Joseph who, in doing this, fulfilled the prophecy of Micah
that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem; it is Joseph who worked to provide
for and protect his family by finding shelter in a nearby cave when there was
no room in the inn (Navarre Lk 1:1-2:23).
St. Bernadine of Siena
explains that it was Joseph, our Holy Patriarch, who was “a father to our Lord
Jesus Christ and a faithful spouse to the Queen of the Universe, our Lady of
the Angels. The eternal Father chose
Joseph to be the guardian and protector of his greatest treasures, his Son and
his Spouse, and Joseph fulfilled his calling with perfect fidelity. If the Church is indebted to the Blessed
Virgin for having given Christ to us, then, after Mary, great gratitude and
veneration is also owed to St. Joseph.”
(ibid)
Sometimes
we can forget to turn to St. Joseph
for help in our own lives. He has such a
humble witness in Scripture, but his role in the early life of Jesus Christ and
his closeness to Him, makes him a powerful intercessor for us. We should turn to him and ask him for his
prayers any time we are in need.
One of the
lessons that St. Joseph
teaches us, is how to properly line up our priorities. Let us not treat him as all the others who
neglected him. Our Lord’s poverty at his
birth rings throughout the Scriptures.
Mary laid him in a manger, our Gospel tonight said, “because there was
no room for them in the inn.” John’s
Gospel opens with the words, “he came to his own home, and his own people
received him not.” Matthew’s gospel
reminds us that “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son
of man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Pope Benedict XVI, Infancy Narratives, p. 66)
This stark
reality should cause us to reexamine the priorities we live by. Joseph knew that his highest priority was
tending to his Holy Family. From the
moment of his birth, Jesus is outside of what is important and powerful in the
eyes of the world. Yet he will prove to
be the truly powerful one. Part of what
it means to be Christian is to leave behind what everyone else thinks and
wants, the prevailing standards, in order to know Him who is the Way, the
Truth, and the Life. (p. 67)
There are
many other inspiring details from our Gospel that can provide much fruit for
prayer. The fact that Mary wrapped Jesus
in swaddling clothes, the equivalent of bandages, calls to mind his death. From the outset then, he is the sacrificial
victim and the manger could be seen as a kind of altar. (p. 68)
Our Holy
Father, in his new book on Jesus’ infancy, describes a beautiful insight into
the manger from St. Augustine. The manger is the place where animals find
their food. But now, lying in the
manger, is he who called himself the true bead come down from heaven., the true
nourishment that we need in order to be fully ourselves. This is the food that gives us true life, eternal
life. Thus the manger becomes a
reference to the table of God, to which we are invited so as to receive the
bread of God. (p. 68)
Finally,
there are the shepherds who are the first ones to receive the message of the
newborn King. Being outside of the city,
Jesus was born close to their fields.
They were physically close to him and so they teach us to be inwardly
close to him too. And they were poor,
showing us the great love God has for the poor and challenging us to resist
being tied down by too many things so that we can be freed by the profound
mysteries that only those who are humble have access too. (p. 71)
We receive
then, tonight, a great gift and a great challenge. For Christ to not only be born at a specific
time and place in human history but also in each of our hearts, we need the
help that our faith gives us; we cannot receive such a precious gift by our own
power. We turn to St. Joseph as the patron saint of those
seeking to re-align our priorities around Jesus Christ. With the aid of Joseph’s prayers we can see that
Jesus’ whole life, from beginning to end, is offered for our salvation. We can see that allowing him generously into
our lives is not simply a challenge but a great gift. He is still giving his entire Life to
us. With the humility and poverty of the
shepherds, we allow Jesus to enrich us with his blessings.
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