The Grace of God Has Appeared – Christmas Midnight Mass – Sermon by Father Levine

Fr. Joseph Levine: Holy Family Catholic Church and Missions, Burns, Oregon; December 25. 2024

The grace of God has appeared.

The grace of God has appeared in an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. The infant draws our hearts. The infant wins our trust. The infant encourages us to draw near to God.

The infant is the grace of God, because he is the free gift of God and because he is the very Word made flesh, the Son of God made man, full of grace and truth. (cf. Jn 1:14)

The grace of God has appeared because the infant has come to give us grace, the grace to become children of God, like him. To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the power to become children of God, who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (Jn 1:13)

The grace of God has appeared bringing salvation to all. We all needed to be saved because on account of Adam’s sin we had all lost the grace of God and had been made subject to the reign of sin. The infant has come to free us from sin and restore us to the grace of God by giving his life on the Cross, a sacrifice for sin to reconcile us to God. The wood of the manger and the swaddling clothes, which bind his hands and feet, point ahead to the Cross. For this he came.

The grace of God has appeared, but for our part we must receive that grace, the grace of a new birth, through faith and baptism. Amen, amen I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. (Jn 3:5)

Receiving the gift and the grace we must also receive the training. We are pledged to this through the vows of our baptism, by which we renounced Satan, his work and his empty show, and professed our faith in Jesus Christ. We must become like Christ. We must become as infants in the presence of God, recognizing our complete dependence upon God, and giving him our absolute trust and confidence.

St. Peter writes, So put away all malice and all guile and insincerity and envy and all slander. Like newborn babes, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord. (1 Pe 2:1-3) That pure spiritual milk is the word of God which should shape our minds and hearts the way the Holy Spirit shaped the Body of Christ in the womb of the Virgin.

The training teaches us to reject godless ways. God the Creator has given us a determinate nature with definite limits and a definite purpose and goal, which in turn sets a law for our action; you can’t get to the goal without following the law, just as you can’t get to the endzone in a football game if you run out of bounds. Godless ways reject all this. Godless ways refuse limits and law that come from without. A man cannot very well claim to have made himself, but he evidently can insist on doing as he pleases and even go so far as to claim that it is his right to make himself to be whatever he wishes. God would have us free to pursue the goal he has established for us; indeed, we cannot pursue the goal any other way than by recognizing it and freely choosing to pursue it. Godless ways insist on the freedom to set whatever goal a man may wish.

Contrariwise, we must learn to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this life. This is how Jesus lived, embracing the limitations of human life beginning with his infant flesh, his swaddling bands, and the poverty of the manger, as he said to the Father on entering the world, Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God. (He 10:7)

Temperance accepts the limits of our nature and lives within them; by temperance we master our own desires subordinating them to God’s plan.

By justice we relate rightly to others. Just as by becoming man the Son of God made himself physically present to the people of his time and place and continues to make himself physically present to us here and now through the Holy Eucharist, so our right relation to others means first of all those among whom we live. We must treat each person in accord with his dignity and worth. There is the inherent dignity that each person enjoys, having been created in the image of God. There is the dignity that pertains to a person’s position in the family and human society, which is the foundation of the 4^th commandment, honor your father and your mother. There is the dignity, or lack thereof, that accrues to a person on account of his conduct. There is the dignity of the children of God that comes through baptism. In all this, we must never forget the power of the Blood of Christ to restore a person’s lost dignity; we must never forget what a person can become by the mercy of God.

Devotion submits us completely to the rule of God. By devotion we surrender ourselves into the hands of God, place ourselves completely at his service, without reserve or condition, and so become prompt to do his will in all things.

Godless ways belong purely to this passing, dying life, because the godless man has no power that extends beyond this life. Whatever goal he sets for himself belongs only to this life. He has no thought for the judgment, the account he must render to God for the gift received.

The Christian way that lives temperately, justly, and devoutly in this life, does so in expectation of the appearance of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

We must think here of the words of St. Paul, You have died and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (Col 3:3-4) The grace of God appeared in the infant in the manger to teach us about the hidden reality of the life of grace that he would give to us. Having seen the grace of God in the infant, we must be willing to purse the hidden life of grace, living temperately, justly, and devoutly in this world, unrecognized by men, without the praise and gratitude of men, indeed experiencing the contempt of men, looking forward to the eternal enjoyment of the glory that was first manifest in the infant, heralded by the angelic army, proclaimed by the star, acknowledged even by the ox and ass. (cf. Is 1:3)

Jesus did not come to approve our godless ways, but to deliver us from lawlessness, the supreme lawlessness that rebels against God. He came to cleanse us of sin and free us to be eager to do what is good.

So look upon the infant in the manger. Look at his Virgin Mother. Look at St. Joseph. Do we want to please him? Do we want to trust him? Do we want to love him? Do we want to give him our heart? Or do we want to turn away to our own godless ways? For if they are our very own, they are godless.

Likewise, look at the frail host, which is the Body of Christ, the same Body that was born of the Virgin Mary, that is now entrusted to us in Holy Communion. Do we want to pursue our own godless ways? Or do we want to please him? Do we want to trust him? Do we want to love him? Do we want to give him our heart?