The Gospel of Yes Daily Reflection for Dec. 24, 2023
DECEMBER 24, 2023
SUNDAY OF THE FOURTH WEEK OF ADVENT
A YES TO THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD
OPENING PRAYER:
COME, HOLY SPIRIT. I welcome you into my heart as Mary did. Come with power. Help me to offer my own yes to God the Father, saying with trust: “May it be done unto me according to your word.”
TODAY’S THOUGHT:
As we move from Advent into Christmas Eve, we go back to St. Paul's words to the Romans:
"We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28)
God's providence is so great and all-encompassing that we can declare that all things work for good for those who love God. The great story of our salvation is the story of all the incredible ways God's providence has been at work. His providence is working through things that we thought would totally interrupt God's plan but didn't.
When reflecting on how many of his own people rejected the message of the Gospel, which led Paul to begin preaching to the Gentiles, Paul even saw God's hand in this: "Through their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles." (Romans 11:11) Paul sees how his rejection in the synagogues where he first preached led to him bringing the Gospel out to the Gentiles. We see something similar in the Acts of the Apostles when the persecution of the early Church led the disciples to spread out to other cities, bringing the Gospel out to new areas: "On that day, there broke out a severe persecution of the church in Jerusalem, and all were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria… Now those who had been scattered went about preaching the word." (Acts of the Apostles 8:1,4)
When we say yes to God we are saying yes to the marvelous working of his providence. This is such good news for us! God really can make all things work for the good of those who love him.
God makes use of evil in such a superb way and with such skill that the result is better than if there had never been evil… Nothing falls outside of God’s plan. This is why the tragedy of the world, despite all its terror, has no definitive character. All the absurdity of which mankind's foolishness and blindness are capable is caught up in God’s loving omnipotence. He is able to fit even the absurd into his plan of salvation and thereby give it meaning. (1)
So don't be afraid to offer your yes to the Lord. Even when things don't seem to go according to our own plan, the Lord will work to bend everything back to the fulfillment of his loving plan.
There is great freedom in this: we don't have to worry about controlling all of the details. The Lord will direct things according to his will. So we can remain free and childlike as we trust the Lord.
TODAY’S PRAYER:
Pray through these verses from the prophet Isaiah to help stir up confidence in God's great providence that is always at work:
Isaiah 46:8-10
”Remember this and be firm, take it to heart, you rebels; remember the former things, those long ago: I am God, there is no other; I am God, there is none like me. At the beginning I declare the outcome; from of old, things not yet done. I say that my plan shall stand, I accomplish my every desire."
Isaiah 55:8-11
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways—oracle of the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways, my thoughts higher than your thoughts.
Yet just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down and do not return there till they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful, Giving seed to the one who sows and bread to the one who eats,
So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; It shall not return to me empty, but shall do what pleases me, achieving the end for which I sent it."
FOR YOUR REFLECTION:
Eladimir Fokanov, "La Navidad es el Cristo, nuestro Salvador”
Have you ever wondered why there is often the ox and the ass in the manger scene? The animals aren't explicitly mentioned in the Christmas story found in the Gospels. But an ancient line from the prophet Isaiah explains it:
Isaiah 1:3-4
"The ox knows its owner, and the ass its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, my people does not understand.
Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, sons who deal corruptly! They have forsaken the Lord, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they are utterly estranged."
The Lord complains through Isaiah that farm animals know their owner and master, but Israel did not know or recognize their God. These lines from Isaiah took on new meaning when the Son of God was born and lay in a crib. In light of the birth of our Savior, the ox and ass began to be included in the traditional manger scene, even by St. Francis of Assisi, the first to establish the tradition of the Christmas creche.
It is a wonderful testament to God's providence that even when his own people forsook him and became estranged from him, the Lord continued to unfold his marvelous plan of salvation. Reflecting on the image of the ox and ass hovering over the baby Jesus, let's pray for a new confidence in the working of God's providence.
For those who would like to go deeper, here is a reflection on this mystery from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict).
Francis directed that an ox and an ass should be present in the cave of Greccio on Christmas night.
He had told the nobleman John: “I wish in full reality to awaken the remembrance of the child as he was born in Bethlehem and of all the hardship he had to endure in his childhood. I wish to see with my bodily eyes what it meant to lie in a manger and sleep on hay, between an ox and an ass.”
From then on, the ox and ass have had their place in every crib scene — but where do they actually come from? It is well known that the Christmas narratives of the New Testament do not mention them. When we investigate this question, we discover an important factor in all the customs associated with Christmas and, indeed, in all the Christmas and Easter piety of the Church in both liturgy and popular customs.
The ox and ass are not simply products of the pious imagination: the Church’s faith in the unity of the Old and New Testaments has given them their role as an accompaniment of the Christmas event. We read in Isaiah: “The ox knows its owner, and the ass its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, my people does not understand” (1:3).
The Fathers of the Church saw in these words a prophecy that pointed ahead to the new people of God, the Church consisting of both Jews and Gentiles’. Before God, all men, Jews and Gentiles, were like the ox and ass, without reason or knowledge. But the child in the crib has opened their eyes so that they now recognize the voice of their Master, the voice of their Lord.
It is striking to note in the mediaeval pictures of Christmas how the artists give the two animals almost human faces and how they stand before the mystery of the child and bow down in awareness and reverence. But after all, this was only logical, since the two animals were considered the prophetical symbol for the mystery of the Church — our own mystery, since we are but oxen and asses vis-à-vis the Eternal God, oxen and asses whose eyes are opened on Christmas night, so that they can recognize their Lord in the crib.
Who recognized him, and who failed to recognize him?
But do we really recognize him? When we place the ox and ass beside the crib, we must remember the whole passage in Isaiah, which is not only good news — in the sense of the promise of a future knowledge - but also a judgment pronounced on contemporary blindness. The ox and ass have knowledge, “but Israel does not know, my people does not understand.”
Who is the ox and ass today, and who is “my people” without understanding? How can we recognize the ox and the ass? How can we recognize “my people”? And why does the lack of reason recognize, while reason is blind?
In order to discover the answer, we must return with the Fathers of the Church to the first Christmas. Who recognized him? And who failed to recognize him? And why was this so?
The one who failed to recognize him was Herod, who did not even understand when they told him about the child: instead, he was blinded all the more deeply by his lust for power and the accompanying paranoia (Mt 2:3).
Those who failed to recognize him were “all Jerusalem with him” (ibid.). Those who failed to recognize him were the “people in soft garments” - those with a high social position (Mt 11: 8).
Those who failed to recognize him were the learned masters who were experts in the Bible, the specialists in biblical interpretation who admittedly knew the correct passage in Scripture but still failed to understand anything (Mt 2:6).
Those who recognized him were the “ox and the ass” (in comparison to these men of prestige): the shepherds, the Magi, Mary and Joseph. But could things have been otherwise? Those with a high social position are not in the stable where the child Jesus lies: that is where the ox and the ass have their home.
And what about us? Are we so far away from the stable because our garments are much too soft and we are much too clever?
Do we get entangled to such an extent in learned exegesis of the Scriptures, in demonstrations of the inauthenticity or the historical accuracy of individual passages, that we become blind to the child himself and perceive nothing of him?
Are we so much in “Jerusalem”, in the palace, at home in ourselves and in our arrogance and our paranoia, that we cannot hear at night the voice of the angels and then set out to adore the child?
In this night, then, the faces of the ox and the ass look at us with a question: My people do not understand, but do you perceive the voice of your Lord?
When we place the familiar figures in the crib scene, we ought to ask God to give our hearts the simplicity that discovers the Lord in the child - just as Francis once did in Greccio.
For then we, too, might experience what Celano relates about those who took part in Midnight Mass in Greccio — and his words echo closely Saint Luke’s words about the shepherds on the first Christmas night: Each one went home full of joy.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Stinissen, 15-16.