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Office Of Readings | Christmas | 31st December | A Reading From A Sermon By Pope Saint Leo The Great | The Birthday Of The Lord Is The Birthday Of Peace
‘The birthday of the Lord is the birthday of peace.’
In this reading, Pope Saint Leo the Great reflects on the Nativity as an event that concerns not only Christ, but the whole Church. The feast renews the reality of Christ’s birth, even though the historical events of his childhood, passion and resurrection are complete. What is celebrated is not repetition, but participation.
Leo makes a direct connection between the birth of Christ and the life of the Christian. The birth of the Head is the birth of the body. Christ’s nativity is therefore the source of Christian life. What took place once in Christ is shared by believers through baptism, death to sin, resurrection and ascension.
This sharing is not symbolic only. Leo insists that every believer, wherever they are and whenever they live, truly passes from the old human condition into a new one through rebirth in Christ. The Christian is no longer defined by natural descent, but by adoption. Christ became Son of man so that human beings might become sons of God.
The adoption is entirely dependent on Christ’s humility. Leo states clearly that without Christ’s descent, no one could reach God by their own merits. Salvation is a gift received, not an achievement earned.
The response required of Christians must correspond to the gift given. Leo draws on Saint Paul to show that what has been received from God must be returned to God. The fitting gift for the feast of the Nativity is peace.
Peace is described not as a feeling, but as a state created by Christ. It gives birth to the sons of God, sustains love, and produces unity. Peace joins human beings to God by loosening their attachment to the world.
Leo concludes in this reading by stressing unity within the Church. Those reborn of God must live in harmony with one another. Since Christ is one, his body must not be divided. The peace proclaimed at Christ’s birth is therefore both a gift and a responsibility. Christ himself is this peace, and through him all are brought to the Father in one Spirit.
A Reading From A Sermon By Pope Saint Leo The Great | The Birthday Of The Lord Is The Birthday Of Peace
God’s Son did not disdain to become a baby. Although with the passing of the years he moved from infancy to maturity, and although with the triumph of his passion and resurrection all the actions of humility which he undertook for us were finished, still today’s festival renews for us the holy childhood of Jesus born of the Virgin Mary. In adoring the birth of our Saviour, we find we are celebrating the commencement of our own life, for the birth of Christ is the source of life for Christian folk, and the birthday of the Head is the birthday of the body.
Every individual that is called has his own place, and all the sons of the Church are separated from one another by intervals of time. Nevertheless, just as the entire body of the faithful is born in the font of baptism, crucified with Christ in his passion, raised again in his resurrection, and placed at the Father’s right hand in his ascension, so with Him are they born in this nativity.
For this is true of any believer in whatever part of the world, that once he is reborn in Christ he abandons the old paths of his original nature and passes into a new man by being reborn. He is no longer counted as part of his earthly father’s stock but among the seed of the Saviour, who became the Son of man in order that we might have the power to be the sons of God.
For unless He came down to us in this humiliation, no one could reach his presence by any merits of his own.
The very greatness of the gift conferred demands of us reverence worthy of its splendour. For, as the blessed Apostle teaches, We have received not the spirit of this world but the Spirit which is of God, that we may know the things which are given us by God. That Spirit can in no other way be rightly worshipped, except by offering him that which we received from him.
But in the treasures of the Lord’s bounty what can we find so suitable to the honour of the present feast as the peace which at the Lord’s nativity was first proclaimed by the angel-choir?
For it is that peace which brings forth the sons of God. That peace is the nurse of love and the mother of unity, the rest of the blessed and our eternal home. That peace has the special task of joining to God those whom it removes from the world.
So those who are born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man but of God must offer to the Father the unanimity of peace-loving sons, and all of them, adopted parts of the mystical Body of Christ, must meet in the First-Begotten of the new creation. He came to do not his own will but the will of the one who sent him; and so too the Father in his gracious favour has adopted as his heirs not those that are discordant nor those that are unlike him, but those that are one with him in feeling and in affection. Those who are re-modelled after one pattern must have a spirit like the model.
The birthday of the Lord is the birthday of peace: for thus says the Apostle, He is our peace, who made both one; because whether we are Jew or Gentile, through Him we have access in one Spirit to the Father.
Christian Prayer With Jesus Christ
Lord Jesus Christ,
you are our peace,
born in humility for our salvation.
Grant that we who are reborn in you
may live as children of God,
seeking unity, patience and concord.
May the peace proclaimed at your birth
shape our lives and our worship.
Amen
Glossary Of Christian Terms
Nativity | The birth of Jesus Christ.
The Head and the body | Christ as the head of the Church, with believers as his body.
Baptism | The sacrament through which a person is reborn in Christ and incorporated into the Church.
Adoption | The gift by which believers become children of God through Christ.
Peace | The reconciliation with God and with one another brought about by Christ.
Mystical Body of Christ | The Church understood as united to Christ and sharing his life.
Rebirth | The passage from the old life of sin to new life in Christ.
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