WHEN I WAS GROWING UP we had a dog—a mongrel. It’s the only dog we ever had. We didn’t have it that long because it got hit by a car as a puppy. Her name was Princess. In my brief experience as a dog owner I learned something about dogs and dog training. If you try to point something out to a dog (literally, point out something using your finger), the dog will most likely look at your finger (may even try to bite it) instead of the object you are pointing to. It can be extremely frustrating, but it does illustrate a natural mistake we all make from time to time.

It also illustrates a mistake that many make when reading Luke’s Christmas story that we just heard proclaimed. For example: What do we know about Jesus’ birth? Well, one thing is the manger, the Christmas crib. The most famous animal feeding-trough in all of history. You see it on Christmas cards, in crèche scenes in churches and homes. Speculations as to why a manger was used, why there was no room in the local lodgings, can erroneously distract from Luke’s intent and purpose—as do homilies about the supposed heartlessness of the unmentioned innkeeper. It’s like my dog Princess seeing only my finger and missing what I was pointing at.

The manger is not necessarily a sign of poverty but points to, evokes, God’s complaint against Israel in the first chapter of Isaiah: “The ox knows its owner and the donkey knows the manger of its Lord; but Israel has not known me…” Luke is proclaiming that this saying from Isaiah has been revoked. In other words, God’s people (represented by the shepherds) have indeed begun to know the manger of their Lord.

Here’s another pointing finger in Luke’s Christmas story: “And so Joseph went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to David’s town of Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to register with his espoused wife, who was with child.” Now we already know from Luke’s annunciation scene, at the beginning of his infancy narrative, that Mary was a virgin. The story makes it clear that Jesus was conceived in Mary’s womb before she had had any sexual relations. It is not uncommon today to find people (sometimes even those who call themselves believers) who find this impossible or at least very difficult to believe. And they usually support this difficulty by seeing it as something that has arisen only in modern times because of all we know about the precise mechanisms of conception and birth which our ancient ancestors were not aware of. The ancient world didn’t know about X chromosomes and Y chromosomes, but they knew, as well as we do, how babies are conceived and where they come from. They knew that people who claimed to be pregnant by other means might well be covering up a moral or social offence.

I’d like to continue to unpack this detail (this pointing finger) of Mary being a pregnant virgin. And I’d like to begin by noting what this story is not saying. The story, as Luke shapes it, says nothing about Mary remaining a virgin after Jesus’ birth. The fact that she did, as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox and other mainline Christian churches hold, comes from later, Spirit-led thought and reflection. Nor does this story of Mary being a virgin mother say anything about the goodness or badness of sexual identity or sexual relations.

Whatever Luke is trying to say with this story, he is not saying that virginity is a morally better state than marriage. He is not denigrating sex, women, conception or the birthing process. He is simply reporting that Jesus did not have a father in the ordinary way and that this was because of who Jesus was and because Mary had been given a special grace to be the mother of God’s incarnate self.

So what is Luke pointing to with this “finger”—the theme of the virgin mother? Luke is making a significant point, one which is all of a piece with his presentation of the good news of Jesus throughout his entire gospel. Let’s not forget that this infancy narrative was put together and given shape after the events of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And this is the point, or at least one of the significant points, Luke is making: that in Jewish tradition virginity is a bad thing. This contrasts later Christian traditions that borrow from Greek and Latin categories of thought.

Throughout the Old Testament, virginity is a negative characteristic. It is useless, despised and pointless. References to Israel as a virgin (in Amos, Joel and Lamentations), which have sometimes gained a positive spin in Christian liturgy, are in fact wholly negative in their original context, and refer to Israel’s failure and disobedience. This is nowhere better seen than in the prophet Jeremiah. It is the only example in the Old Testament of someone who chooses virginity and explains why the choice is made. It is made because it is an enacted prophecy of Israel’s future, namely, its cataclysmic inability to bear fruit. (Can the impossible be possible? Can a virgin conceive?)

Luke’s entire Gospel speaks of Jesus as the friend of our frailty, the bride-groom of our brokenness, the spouse of our sinfulness. His Gospel is telling us that Mary is a virgin because—like the smelly shepherds (and all they represent) and like the inappropriate stable—this is exactly whom God would choose to be the Mother of God: a person with precisely the wrong qualifications! A young teenage virgin can really be the Queen of Heaven because this is the upside-down world of the Kingdom with all its upside-down values. As Mary herself says in her Magnificat: “He has deposed the mighty from their thrones and raised the lowly to high places” (Lk 1:46).

In this new, upside-down world even the Risen Christ still bears the wounds of the Cross. This is the shape, these are the contours, of salvation, the scandalous shape—from conception to crib and cross—in which scandal reigns.

So, what does all this have to say to us on this holy Night? How do we really own the mystery we are immersed in? Because if we don’t, well, then every-thing comes down to just a nice time, nice liturgy and music, pretty decora-tions…. If that’s all there is to it, then we could just yawn a big ‘So what?’ But our tradition tells us that our experience of Christ’s Birth is meant to be much more personal than that.

St. Ambrose says to us: You too are blessed because you have heard and believed. The soul of every believer conceives and brings forth the Word of God… Christ has only one mother in the flesh, but we all bring forth Christ by faith. And St. Augustine says: What does it avail me if this birth is always happening if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters. And Meister Eckhart: Therefore we shall speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us and be consummated in the virtuous soul. And finally Angelus Silesius exclaims:

Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
But not within thyself, thy soul shall be forlorn.

The contours, the shape, of salvation that I just spoke about is just that, a shape, an outline, a contour that is meant to be filled in with the stuff of our lives. The very stuff of it—as inadequate, as less-than-qualified, as broken, as scandal-ridden as it may be—is what gives color and texture, flesh and blood, to the shape and outline of salvation. The stuff of our lives in all its fragility and woundedness is the finger pointing, groping, for the Savior—signs of his coming to birth in us and for us, something like birth-pangs. God wants to be as close to us as our brokenness and need are close to us.

Volumes have been written on the question, ‘Why did God become human?’ One possible answer I will leave you with tonight is this: Because the fingers of our Infant-God are tiny enough to find their way into all the cracks, crevices and fractures of our broken hearts, minds and world.

A Blessed Christmas to you all!

Homily for Christmas Mass at Midnight

- Dom Damian Carr, O.C.S.O.

Homily for Epiphany 2012

Homily for Corpus Christi 2011

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Homily for Epiphany 2010