Do Not Be Afraid

N.B. This homily refers to the readings for the Vigil Mass of Christmas, found here.

It is a great joy for me to be here with you on maybe the most special evening of the year. Everyone knows that Christmas Eve is a time to be with family, with loved ones, and so although I don’t know you, I feel honored to be with all of you as spiritual family. And we have gathered here, in the house of the Lord – our spiritual family home, so to speak.

We are united by our faith, but we come here in different places and at different moments in our lives. Some of us, praise God, have come with smiles on our faces, with warmth and cheer in our hearts and good will towards men. But others of us are struggling. Perhaps some of us have come *because* we are struggling, asking for some hope and peace in the midst of our difficulties. We face physical ailments and illnesses, financial struggles, problems in our workplace, relationship difficulties, spiritual desolations, worries about the future, emotional fatigue and mental health challenges, and much, much more. There’s a good chance that all of us are facing something right now that feels exhausting, overwhelming, incapacitating, either in the world out there or in our own little worlds, and for those that aren’t, we probably soon will be.

Maybe that puts a little damper on our cheery mood this evening, but believe it or not, that is good news. Because while our struggles are not fun or easy, the fact that we are facing them means that we are in good company. The Virgin Mary knew what it was like to face hardship; she was asked by God to give birth to his Son, without a home or a husband and only a fiancé who may or may not have understood. Joseph, too, faced difficulty: his own fears and a sense of unworthiness to take such a holy lady into his home, most likely enduring the scorn of his friends and the gossip of his neighbors in doing so. None of us – not even those called to be the parents of Jesus – are exempt from facing things that are scary, worrisome, perplexing, and exasperating.

The Good News, however, is that God is not silent in all of this. He has something to say to us, and his message comes through the angel Gabriel, first to Mary, and then to Joseph, and then also to us in whatever struggle or sorrow is currently weighing on us or that ever will do so. He says to us, “Do not be afraid.” Don’t be afraid. Why? Because fear is often the first step away from faith – a temptation toward trying to figure things out ourselves, or to abandoning hope and belief altogether. And so that’s why God says, “No, stop, don’t be afraid” – to nip in the bud that temptation to doubt, and to assure us that he is with us.

The Dream of Saint Joseph (c. 1640) by Georges de la Tour

Last Sunday, if you recall, we heard pretty much the same Gospel as the one that we heard tonight, with only two differences. The first is that, in the longer form of this Gospel, we have the genealogy of Jesus. Saint Matthew gives us the long litany of those men and women who were Jesus’s ancestors as a way of showing us that God’s idea to send us the Savior was not one that he hatched overnight. The plan of our salvation was carefully prepared, and it played out slowly, through good people and some not-so-good people as well.

But the second change in the Gospel this week is the very last verse, Matthew 1:25, which tells us that after Joseph took Mary into his home, she bore a Son, who was named Jesus. That’s the most important part of the whole long Gospel! That one verse makes all the difference between last week and this one, between the promise and the proof. Jesus is the reason we need not be afraid. His presence is the confirmation that God was not lying when he told Mary to trust in him, when he had told Joseph to trust in him. When God tells us to trust in him, no matter what our sorrow or struggle is, Jesus is our proof that God is trustworthy. Why? Because Jesus is Emmanuel, “God-with-us,” born for us. He has come to dwell with us, not only to share our dysfunctional world but to redeem it and transform it and to elevate it by his grace.

One of the most powerful messengers of this truth was Pope St. John Paul II, the Polish priest who was pope a couple of popes ago. If you know his story, you know that he certainly was familiar with sorrow and struggle. His mother died when he was nine; his brother, when he was twelve; his father, when he was nineteen. The Nazis forced him to work in a factory; he had to study in secret in the seminary; and when he was a priest and later a bishop, he endured opposition and persecution from the communist regime.

With all of these sufferings and challenges, you might expect John Paul to have been stern and severe. But the opposite is true! He was a man of great joy and laughter and hope – not because he didn’t suffer, but because in his sufferings he knew the Lord Jesus was with him, as his Savior, as the One can transform this fallen world. And wherever he went, St. John Paul preached that the same relationship was possible for others, often by repeating some words he had borrowed from the angel Gabriel: “Do not be afraid.” In the first homily he ever gave as pope, he said: “Brothers and sisters, do not be afraid to welcome Christ and accept his power… Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ... So often today man does not know what is within him, in the depths of his mind and heart. So often he is uncertain about the meaning of his life on this earth. He is assailed by doubt, a doubt which turns into despair. We ask you therefore, we beg you with humility and trust, let Christ speak to man. He alone has words of life, yes, of eternal life.”

St. John Paul II, addressing the crowd in St. Peter Square on the day of his election as pope, October 22, 1978.

That, my friends, is what the Lord wants us to hear tonight. It is his message for us – not just for our present concerns and worries and difficulties, but always: “Do not be afraid.” Whatever you may be facing, today or tomorrow or anytime, don’t give in to your fears, but instead find your strength in Christ the Lord. Open wide the doors of your heart, and let him enter. Let him transform your world: this Savior, Emmanuel, born of Mary this night for us, whose name is Jesus.

Rejoicing in Our Hardships

There’s an old saying, “Fortune is a fickle mistress.” In other words, just when things seem to be going well, good fortune often abandons us. The crooner Frank Sinatra put it another way in one of his most famous songs: “They call you Lady Luck/ But there is room for doubt/ At times you have a very un-lady-like way/ Of running out!”

John the Baptist knew the fickleness of fortune all too well. In last week’s Gospel, we heard how people from Jerusalem, Judea, and all over the region of the Jordan – an area of some several hundred square miles – were coming out into the desert to hear him preach and to receive his baptism of repentance. In today’s Gospel, John is in a very different place: he in prison, awaiting his own execution. Lady Luck, it seems, has run out on him! John had been the voice calling out in the wilderness, preaching to multitudes, the one that everyone wanted to see. But he ends his life alone, beheaded in a cold prison cell.

This sharp change in the fortunes of John the Baptist might surprise us. We might think, “Is this any way for God to treat the prophet whom he sent to preach the coming of his Son?” But while we might be caught off guard, John himself certainly was not. He knew his role was a temporary one. His job was to point toward the Messiah and then move out of the way. As he himself says about Jesus, “he must increase, and I must decrease.” What John was after wasn’t worldly fame and fortune, but something deeper. He wanted salvation – not just for himself, but for all, for the world. He wanted God’s People to finally receive the fullness of redemption that had long been promised to them, and then God was at last ready to send. That was John’s mission – to prepare the Lord’s way – and in the end he was willing to lay down his life to see it through.

Today is the Third Sunday of Advent, sometimes called “Gaudete” Sunday, a Latin word that means “Rejoice.” Using the pink candle and vestments, we look ahead with expectation and joy to the dawning of the Lord’s salvation. Because like John the Baptist, it is salvation that we are after. That’s what we prayed for in the opening prayer today: “Enable us, we pray, to attain the joys of so great a salvation.” Salvation is lasting. It is not fickle like fortune; it doesn’t abandon us like Lady Luck. And today, on this Gaudete Sunday, we celebrate with joy that salvation is now very near, that it is coming soon – not just at Christmas, not just in this holiday season, but in every way that the Lord desires to enter more fully into our lives.

Whenever we encounter Jesus, we encounter his salvation. Sometimes that salvation comes in the ways we like – as blessings of peace and prosperity, happiness, love, meaning, purpose, fulfillment. But sometimes the Lord’s salvation has more difficult manifestations: for example, contrition or guilt, when we have sinned; perseverance or resolve, when we are enduring some trial; perhaps even sorrow or loss, when we experience the fickle nature of this world's fortunes. But even these more challenging experiences are forms of the Lord’s salvation, ways that he draws us more closely to himself.

Joseph Dietrich, John the Baptist in Prison (c. 1740)

And for that reason, these more difficult encounters with the Lord are reasons to be joyful, even in the midst of pain or confusion. Our Gospel does not say it explicitly, but surely John the Baptist rejoiced when he heard from his friends what they had seen and heard: that in Jesus, the blind regained their sight, the lame walked, lepers were cleansed, the deaf heard, the dead were raised, and the poor had the good news preached to them. Surely, he was joyful and gave thanks to hear that the salvation that he had long hoped for had finally come to pass – even though he himself was still in a prison cell, awaiting his own death.

We can think too of Saint Juan Diego, the man who received the apparition of the Virgin Mary on the hill of Tepeyac five hundred years ago. When the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him, she appeared to him as one expecting a child, bearing within herself the Lord Jesus. The Virgin Mary's coming was a cause for joy, but it didn't make Juan Diego's life perfectly easy. He had to endure the hardship of his uncle's illness; he had to endure the difficulty of having the archbishop not believe him at first about the apparitions; he surely had other challenges and difficulties as well. But he opened himself to receiving the Lord's presence, with faith and with rejoicing, and he was rewarded for his perseverance.

Friends, perhaps the question for us in this Advent season is this: can we be joyful in welcoming the Lord’s salvation in whatever manner it comes to us? John the Baptist and Juan Diego were saints focused not on their own good fortune but on God’s salvation, and who rejoiced when it came even though it brought them hardship. Are we willing to go through difficulties to receive the coming of the Lord, perhaps to be misunderstood as Juan Diego was, perhaps even to give up our own life as John the Baptist did? Are we able to rejoice at what the Lord comes to give us – even in those blessings and invitations that are not so enjoyable, but which nonetheless bring us closer to him?

Let us now prepare our hearts for the Eucharist we will celebrate, for in this banquet too Jesus comes, to bless us with a foretaste of the heavenly feast. May the Lord, who draws near to us, enable us, we pray, to attain the joys of so great a salvation.