To help celebrate the Christmas season, Holy Mother Church offers 3 choices for Mass in the Extraordinary Form. While all are lovely in their own little way, I believe of particular significance is the so-called “Mass at Dawn” or the second Mass, typically celebrated on Christmas morning. Another way to know this Mass is by knowing it as the “Mass of light” as the Introit begins with the prayer Lux fulgebit of Isaiah 9:2 (a light shall shine down upon us).
Understanding Christ via the nature of light is one of the most ancient ways of understanding in the Church. According to the Patriarch Maximos IV of the Melkite Church, the East has long understood Christ’s mission as a “flood of divine light on the work of creation.” Today’s liturgy helps us to understand the purpose of that light.
First and foremost, the Divine Light that is Christ “illuminates our mind by faith.” In today’s society, to be religious is painted as being opposed to using your intellect. Even some of our snootier clerics look down upon the “simple faith” of the average pew sitter as being a form of rabid fundamentalism opposed to reason. Nothing could be further from the truth. Properly understood, faith supplements reason because faith concerns the soul. Reason provides everything you can learn about the knowable world. Yet we Catholics understand that the human person is composed of a physical mortal body and a corporeal immortal soul.
Faith is what helps provide understanding of that soul. This is the main reason that the all Popes (but especially the popes from Leo XIII to Francis) have rejected the world’s call that the Church should stick with religious doctrine and stop talking about the problems of this world. If there are problems in the world, only an understanding formed by the Catholic Church can solve them, because only an understanding formed by the Church understands the soul. This doesn’t mean that you have to be Catholic to have a good idea, only that any policy worthy of adaptation has to take into account the spiritual side of man, whatever you wish to call it.
Another misunderstanding surrounding faith is our perception of those who do not have it. Due to cultural ignorance, it is at times believed that those without faith have always been “barbarians” the Gospel civilized. Such an understanding would be incomplete in the eyes of the first Christians. Yes, there were frequently great acts of barbarism amongst those without Christ, but we also know of the concept of seeds of the word, the idea that God has planted in pagan knowledge signs which point to Christ. It is why Christians were students of the Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. When the light of Christ shone on these seeds, they grew into the plant that is the intellectual tradition of Western Civilization, a distinctly Catholic intellectual tradition.
While we know what this Divine Light does, how can we receive it? What can we do to gain such a light? If we are to believe the Epistle, the answer is simple: nothing. Nothing we can do can give us the right to claim this light as our own. The Council of Trent states that nothing we do, faith or works, can “merit the grace itself of justification.” (Session VI, Chapter VIII) Instead we see in the Scriptures what provides this light: the washing of regeneration in baptism.
This passive nature of the Christian is reinforced in the Gospel reading, which recounts the story of the Shepherds encountering Christ, and the great joy this encounter gave them. We don’t know much about these shepherds. Were they devout? Did they pray a novena on the way to Bethlehem? Maybe they were just herders looking for adventure during the boring watch? Perhaps we are just meant to fill in our blanks about these individuals. What we know is that these individuals were prompted by God to see something truly magnificent. The one thing we do know about shepherds is that they tend to be the forgotten ones. David was a shepherd, and viewed the last of the sons of Jesse. When the call is also given to the noble magi, we see that God’s message is given to all walks of life. All, at one stage or another in their life, will feel the pull on the heart by God to seek him out. There’s nothing we can do but answer the call.
This isn’t to discount prayer, study, and works of mercy in the path of evangelization. All of these things help. They just can’t reach God by themselves. All of these things can only truly draw power if we first come and see. When we encounter Christ, then the light of faith is shined upon us, and also within us.
I would submit that this point is the most important part of the Gospel. Immediately after encountering Christ, these shepherds share with others what happened. They might not have used advanced apologetics arguments. They probably weren’t conversant in the latest exegetical approach of the Hebrew Scriptures. None of this mattered. They told the world of a great joy that came upon their hearts, and how the angels intruded upon their lives, bursting with excitement to tell them to witness the greatest moment in human history. This is what Christianity in a nutshell is. We are those shepherds who have encountered Christ, and afterwards we spread word of that encounter to everyone around us.
A chief way that light is given to us is through the Holy Eucharist. The post-communion states that because of that Eucharist, we are ever restored. Every time we receive communion, we return to that original calling of the shepherds, and once we receive him, we reprise their role of going out to men. It is for this reason the Roman Rite has concluded every Mass with a reflection on the prologue of John’s Gospel, which is on the nature of the light of Christ. We do this because we are about to go back into the world, as light shining in the darkness thanks to our participation in the sacrifice of Christ.
While we rightly celebrate with gifts, it is important to remember this gift. “Jesus is the reason for the season” has become such a tired cliché. We don’t even realize what we are giving when we speak of Christ anymore. Let us call to mind the example of those simple shepherds, whose encounter with the Messiah changed their life forever, and the first thing they felt compelled to do was tell everyone they knew about this experience.
image: Jurand / Shutterstock.com
