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Á¦¸ñ The Mystery of Christmas is Jesus in Our Soul(2018-12-25 Midnight)
ÀÛ¼ºÀÚ °ü¸®ÀÚ ÀÛ¼ºÀÏ 2018-12-26





The Mystery of Christmas is Jesus in Our Soul(Midnight) Go Pictures


Introduction


We are celebrating tonight the birth of God¡¯s Son in a poor cow shed of Bethlehem of Juda. It is certainly the most extraordinary event in the history of mankind, but this extraordinary event happened in very humble circumstances: during the night, in the cold of winter, in one of the smallest and most ignored towns of Palestine, in a poor, dirty and stinking cowshed. And yet that birth was surrounded by a lot of joy: we can easily imagine the deep interior joy of Mary and Joseph, the Angel telling the shepherds: ¡°I bring you good tidings of great joy, that shall be to all the people¡±, the shepherds who, after visiting Jesus, ¡°returned glorifying and praising God¡±.


Which lesson can we draw for our spiritual benefit?


1.  Bethlehem= our soul wounded by our own sins


The poor circumstances where Jesus was born are a good image of the pitiable state of our soul: there is darkness in us, that is to say our intelligence is weak and slow to know the truth and prone to make errors; there is also cold in our soul, that is to say we are tepid, not burning with the love of God and of our neighbour, on the contrary we are full of selfishness; as Bethlehem was just a small and poor town, we by our nature are just little and powerless creatures. As OLJ told one day St Catherine of Siena: ¡°I am the One who is, you are the one who is not¡±. And at last, the dirtiness and stench of the cowshed are an image of our soul stained by our sins.


We can really look at Bethlehem and the cowshed and the circumstances in which Jesus was born as an image of the state of our soul.


2.  The Mystery of Christmas= Jesus in our soul


The Mystery of Christmas which we are celebrating tonight is the Mystery of the Emmanuel, God with us, God abiding with us. This Mystery happened once historically speaking around 2018 years ago when the Son of God was physically born from the BVM, having a body and soul like ours. But the same mystery happens spiritually in our soul when we are baptized, every time we receive Holy Communion. Indeed as Jesus was not scared of being born in the humble circumstances we have described, so He is not scared of coming and abiding in our soul in spite of the weakness of our intelligence, the tepidity of our love, the littleness of our nature and the spiritual dirtiness of our soul.
When we look at the crib tonight, let us realize that the Mystery of the Emmanuel is a reality for each one of us: Jesus wants to come and abide in us, poor creatures. Incredible reality because totally free and beyond all what we could expect, but a reality all the same due to God¡¯s goodness and mercy.


3.  Joy of Christmas


The Angel said it: ¡°I bring you good tidings of great joy¡±: the mystery of the Emmanuel is a source of great joy indeed: the Good God abiding in us, the Good God who is everything and much more than what we can imagine. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem on that night, what did it matter to Mary and Joseph to be in a cowshed, to have been rejected from the town, to be ignored by the world, maybe to be hungry and cold? God was with them and they were full of joy because of that. What a good lesson for us! What does it matter to us to be ¡°small¡± people according to the criterions of this world, to be rejected or ignored by the others, to have this or that problem in life if we have Jesus-Christ the Son of God abiding in our soul by sanctifying grace? Jesus brings us the eternity; this world and its cares and struggles will come to an end.


The joy of Christmas, the joy of having Christ with us, expresses the root of Christian joy: the joy to be with God, whatever our temporal situation is, whatever suffering we have to face.


Conclusion


Dear faithful who have done the effort to stay awakened and come for that midnight Mass, may you receive a big increase of sanctifying grace in your soul tonight and be filled with Christian joy for ¡°I bring you good tidings of great joy, that shall be to all the people; for this day is born to you a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord, in the city of David¡±.


Fr. Demornex