THE MESSAGE OF CHRISTMAS is that God loves us beyond all our hope and all our guessing and that His gift to us is not just some created good thing, however wonderful – but simply Himself. Jesus is the fulfilment of all that the Old Testament hoped for. He is the light in our darkness – the Gift in our poverty – the Spring for which our Winter waits, but He is more.
Through His Christmas birth, He is fully immersed in our situation. Christ is on our end of this love affair as well as on God’s. He shared our human condition and our human mind. From within our human experience he had to discover the Father’s love, to grapple with the mystery of it and to learn to respond to it at every level of His life, as we do. The child whose birthday we are keeping today took on an open-ended job.
He had to grow, to learn, to discover, to take risks and to explore possibilities. Jesus is no Peter Pan clinging to the securities of childhood. It took Him a lifetime to discover and work out what it meant to be a man fully responding to the Father’s love from within manhood.
Only by going down to the darkest and most negative of human experiences in His Passion did He arrive at the full maturity of human self-giving. He went down into our deepest darkness to taste our bitter experience so that He could make of all that the place for saying yes to the Father’s love and transform it all from the inside.
The darkness tried to smother the light and failed. All our experiences our sorrows and joys are now the place for knowing Him, the place of openness and hope. Christmas is the good news for the utterly poor. It’s about forgiveness and healing and reconciliation, about peace stronger than our terror, about laughter for the desolate, gifts for the undeserving, joy out of sorrow and life out of death.
It is sheer gift and we qualify. It is the guarantee that everyman’s longing is not a mocking dream, but only a glimpse of what shall be. Because God is totally committed to us – we are unconditionally loved.
I had the privilege of saying a few words to you through this little video. I want to thank the Principle Mr Peter Roche. I hope you have a very special Holy and peaceful Christmas. Remember that what he celebrate is the greatest gift of all, the gift of Gods love in Jesus. I know that all the boys and girls will bring that gift into their homes, today and always. God bless you all, Father Joe.
Christmas Eve Mass: 7:30pm.
Christmas day Mass: 09:30am and 11:30am
These Masses are ticket only due to Covid.