Hasten to Bethlehem in Jubilee

The Year of Jubilee makes it easier for us to do the things we ought

For the world, Christmas is long over and the New Year has begun. That ever-longer commercial exploitation of the Christian celebration of the Lord’s Birth is now a faded memory, and it is taken up with things like the the tragedies in New Orleans or Las Vegas, or the goings-on in Gaza and the Middle East, or what the Fed might do this year or what is going to happen before the President-elect’s inauguration.

We Christians, however, are still celebrating Christmas. Twelve days of joy and celebration at the Birth of our Savior and King. It takes twelve days to begin to absorb what we have celebrated at Christmas. The God of the Universe, unlimited in wisdom, power, and love, condescended to take human form as an embryo, to undergo nine months of fetal development in the blessed womb of the Blessed Virgin, and then to enter the Royal City, Bethlehem — his royal city — as an outcast, so that everyone, from the Magi on the way to the lowliest of shepherds, might come and worship him. Worship is our highest activity: silence before God Made Man, before Him whose very Birth heralds the Father’s love for the fallen human race and his infinite desire to restore and surpass the original, creational dignity.

The celebration is sober. Amidst all the joy and splendor in which we rightfully rejoice, the Church brings to our attention, on December 26, the martyrdom of St. Stephen, deacon; on the 27th, the death in exile of St. John the Evangelist; on the 28th, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents; on the 29th, the martyrdom of St. Thomas à Becket, who defends the independence and rights of Holy Mother Church against the encroachments of King Henry II; on the 31st, St. Sylvester, Pope, who reigned when the Arian and Donatist heresies were rampant in the Church and threatening to tear her asunder; on January 2, Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nanzianzen, who likewise fought against the Arian heresy, which claimed that the Son of God was created and not begotten; on the 4th, today, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, who converted from Episcopalianism and founded the Sisters of Charity to educate underprivileged children and whose work in education laid the foundations of the American parochial school system. All these, and course of the calendar of saints throughout the liturgical year, remind us that the Lord establishes a kingdom that is not of this world and one that this world actively resists but against which it cannot prevail, try though it might, and does. The establishment of this Kingdom in and through us make run the course of long lives. It may also cost us our lives on earth.

We sing each year at Christmas, “O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray; Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.” It sounds sweet and lovely, and comforting too; but its meaning we have hardly begun to penetrate. For when the Lord does cleanse from sin and enter in, He does so to conduct his mighty work of Redemption in us and through us. He saves us by making us co-redeemers with him, bearers of the glad tidings of the Good News and agents of his mercy especially to the vulnerable and the marginalized, the outcasts. He makes us co-redeemers with himself knowing full well that we will resist in greater or lesser measure the calls to sanctification, conversion of life and morals, and acceptance of the Divine Reversal, which turns us around on the road to death to face us toward life and which tells us the things we think so important really are not, and the things we overlook or despise really are the things that matter. He knows full well in advance which ones of us will freely accept the Cross and who will turn aside from it; whom He will call to physical martyrdom and whom He will grant length of days; who will attain to the heights of sanctity within their states of life, who will muddle through, and who will step away. The love He offers us is overwhelming, and we accept and are awash in joy, or we reject it and are crushed by its incessant calls and pleas. The only right choice is to journey through the fear and live more and more each day the joy to which he call us.

We are blessed this year to be in a Year of Jubilee. Every twenty-five years or so the Church declares a special year of the Lord’s favor and opens wide the treasury of merits entrusted to her so that her children may enter more deeply into the Way of Conversion and discover in it the joys and solaces available to us only in this Way. In the Divine Reversal, the Cross becomes the Tree of Life. In the Divine Reversal, we give up what is killing us so that we can receive that which gives us light, and life, and peace. In a Jubilee Year the abundance of graces freely flowing make it all the easier for us to give up things to which we ordinarily cling with all our might in unfounded fear. The Divine Reversal is especially active right now so that we might truly become, by our acceptance of the gifts God has given us, men and women who truly worship God in the beauty of holiness, in silent adoration. Let us make haste with the Magi to Bethlehem, there to offer the Lord the gifts of ourselves, such as they are, so as to receive from him the matchless and unsurpassable gift of Himself. Jubilee graces this year aid our flight and strengthen our wills to do the things we know we ought and which we have been resisting. Now is our moment.