in the companion volume Celebrating the Saints, pp. 477–83.
At the end of the section, readings are provided for the Sundays of Christmastide. If for pastoral reasons the Feast of the Holy Family is observed on another date, the reading provided for First Sunday of Christmas should be used.
Christmas Day
at night:
A Reading from a sermon for the Nativity of Christ by Julian of Vezelay
‘While gentle silence enveloped the whole earth, and night was halfway through its course, your all-powerful Word, O Lord, leaped down from your royal throne in the heavens.’ In this ancient text of Scripture, the most sacred moment of time is made known to us, the moment when God’s all-powerful Word would leave the tender embrace of the Father and come down into his mother’s womb, bringing us the news of salvation. For, as it says elsewhere in Scripture, ‘God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son,’ declaring: ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.’ And so from his royal throne the Word of God has come to us, humbling himself in order to raise us on high, becoming poor himself in order to make us rich, becoming human in order to make us divine.
So lost and so profoundly unhappy was the human race, that it could only trust in a word that was all-powerful. Anything less would have inspired in us nothing more than the feeblest of hopes in being set free from sin and its power. Therefore, to give poor lost humanity a categorical assurance of being saved, the Word that came to save us was called all-powerful. And see how truly all-powerful that Word was! When neither heaven nor anything under the heavens as yet had existence, the Word spoke, and they came into being, created out of nothing. He spoke the command, ‘Let there be earth,’ and the earth came into being, and when he decreed, ‘Let there be human beings,’ human beings were created.
But the Word of God did not remake his creatures as easily as he had made them. He had made them by issuing a command; he remade them by dying. He made them by commanding; he remade them by suffering. ‘You have burdened me,’ he told them, ‘with your sinning. To direct and govern the whole fabric of the world is no effort for me, for I have power to reach from one end of the world to the other, and to order all things as I please. It is only humanity, with its obstinate disregard for the law I have given, which has caused me distress by their sins. That is why I have come down from my royal throne; that is why I have not shrunk from enclosing myself in the Virgin’s womb nor from entering into a personal union with poor lost humanity. See, I lie in a manger, a newly born baby wrapped in swaddling bands, since the Creator of the world could find no room in the inn.’
And so there came a deep silence and the whole earth was still. The voices of prophets and apostles were hushed, for the prophets had delivered their message, whereas the time for the apostles’ preaching was yet to come. Between these two proclamations a period of silence intervened, and in the midst of this silence the Father’s all-powerful Word leaped down from his royal throne. In this movement is great beauty: in the ensuing silence the mediator between God and man intervened, coming as a human being among human beings, as a mortal among mortals, to save the dead from death.
I pray that the Word of the Lord may come again this night to those who wait in silence, and that we may hear what the Lord God is saying to us in our hearts. Let us, therefore, still the desires and cravings of the flesh, the roving fantasies of our imaginations, so that we can attend to what the Spirit is saying.
during the day:
A Reading from an oration of Gregory of Nazianzus
Christ is born: let us glorify him. Christ comes down from heaven: let us go out to meet him. Christ descends to earth: let us be raised on high. Let all the world sing to the Lord: let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad, for his sake who was first in heaven and then on earth. Christ is here in the flesh: let us exult with fear and joy – with fear, because of our sins; with joy, because of the hope that he brings us.
Once more the darkness is dispersed; once more the light is created. Let the people that sat in the darkness of ignorance now look upon the light of knowledge. The things of old have passed away; behold, all things are made new. He who has no mother in heaven is now born without a father on earth. The laws of nature are overthrown, for the upper world must be filled with citizens. He who is without flesh becomes incarnate; the Word puts on a body; the invisible makes itself seen; the intangible can be touched; the timeless has a beginning; the Son of God becomes the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and for ever.
Light from light, the Word of the Father comes to his own image in the human race. For the sake of my flesh he takes flesh; for the sake of my soul he is united to a rational soul, purifying like by like. In every way he becomes human, except for sin. O strange conjunction! The self-existent comes into being; the uncreated is created. He shares in the poverty of my flesh that I may share in the riches of his Godhead.
This is the solemnity we are celebrating today: the arrival of God among us, so that we might go to God – or more precisely, return to God. So that stripping off our old humanity we might put on the new; for as in Adam we were dead, so in Christ we become alive: we are born with him, and we rise again with him.
A miracle, not of creation, but of re-creation. For this is the feast of my being made whole, my returning to the condition God designed for me, to the original Adam. So let us revere the nativity which releases us from the chains of evil. Let us honour this tiny Bethlehem which restores us to paradise. Let us reverence this crib because from it we, who were deprived of self-understanding, are fed by the divine understanding, the Word of God himself.
alternative reading
A Reading from a treatise Against Heresies by Irenaeus
Just as it is possible for a mother to give her infant strong food but chooses not to do so because her child is not able yet to receive such bodily nourishment; so it was possible for God on his part to have given human beings the fullness of perfection right from the beginning, but we were not capable of receiving so great a gift being mere children. In these last days, however, when our Lord summed up all things in himself, he came to us, not as he could have done, but as we were capable of beholding him. He could, indeed, have come to us in the radiance of his glory, but we were not capable of bearing it. So, as to infants, the perfect Bread of the Father gave himself to us under the form of milk – he came to us as a human being – in order that we might be fed, so to speak, at the breast by his incarnation, and by this diet of milk become accustomed to eating and drinking the Word of God. In this way we might be enabled to keep within us the Bread of Immortality which is the Spirit of the Father.
alternative reading
A Reading from a sermon of Leo the Great
Dearly beloved, today our Saviour was born; let us rejoice! This is no season for sadness – it is the birthday of Life! It is a life that annihilates the fear of death; a life that brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness.
Nobody is an outsider to this happiness; we all have common cause for rejoicing. Our Lord, the victor over sin and death, finding no one free from guilt, has come to free us all. Let the saint exult for the palm of victory is at hand. Let the sinner be glad in receiving the offer of forgiveness. Let the gentile take courage on being summoned to life.
In the fullness of time, chosen in the unfathomable depths of God’s wisdom, the Son of God took on himself our human nature in order to reconcile us with our Creator. He came to overthrow the devil, the origin of death, in that very nature by which
