The Promise Delivered by Christmas

by Bishop Joensen | December 12, 2023

I haven’t bought a Powerball ticket in a long time. That’s no boast; I simply haven’t been paying attention. I don’t think the times I did buy tickets were primarily motivated by greed; I thought about all the sorts of things I would do to benefit family members and the institutions I served—with one exception: I would buy myself a really, really nice bike. 

I’ve never won the lottery.  And chances are, neither have you.  But this dynamic of becoming aware of an immense good joined to the recognition of all that is unfulfilled is not simply a twice/week, spin the cylinder affair. This movement of the heart underlies and expresses the whole of our human lives. Even before we are fully aware of it, the God who is infinite goodness—who cannot be measured by a long series of zeros—has spoken the Word who brought us into being. God gave us hearts that are capable of bearing a promise that communicates his own desire for us, of Love for the beloved.  

God’s immense, tender love moves him to form a covenant with his own creation. Father Guy Mancini, OSB, reminds us of Rabbi Nelson Glueck’s contention that God’s hesed, loving kindness, is the premise and essence of berith, covenant. There can be no covenant and the promise it represents apart from the invitation to loving friendship with God.

God’s promise alone can span the great chasm between creature and Creator by giving us hearts that can receive and return the faith, hope, and love that God supplies to us. The late Monsignor Luigi Giussani, founder of the Catholic Communion and Liberation movement, reflects, “Man is born with this hope; man is born with a heart which corresponds with the promise. . . . The core of life is a promise.” 

Again, in the spirit of Msgr. Giussani, we affirm that faith is to recognize a Presence that is certain. The Christ Presence was certified over 2,000 years ago by the shepherds, by angels, by Mary, by seniors such as Simeon and Anna as they go in peace, by the martyred Holy Innocents and by any of us who are willing to witness to Jesus. And it follows that hope is to recognize a certainty for the future that is born of this Presence.

In eternity, the Son and the Father have no need to make promises to one another, since they are wholly of one will. In the Incarnation of Jesus in the flesh, the mystery of God’s providential plan is revealed: a perfect human will is joined in Jesus’ divine will, and the possibility of his promising on our behalf is initiated. Only if the Father and the Son make promises in history to one another for our sake will we have hope of salvation through the Messiah who descends in the line of David, Jesus of Nazareth.  

For we are a people who repeatedly seem to lose our way, who wander into exile by forgetting the covenant promise. In the evangelist Matthew’s opening genealogy that charts salvation history, he traces the fourteen generations from Abraham to David, followed by the fourteen generations leading to the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people.  Yet to recognize our exiled state, our forced relocation to a city, a world, where believers often feel like aliens—this graced recognition is itself one of the fruits of the promise.  

Fourteen more generations are needed after the Babylonian exile to overcome our stubborn refusal of God’s promise and bring us back to the place about which Jeremiah prophesies: the crib that holds the swaddled body of the Messiah.  How many more generations, how many more thousands of years will pass, until the last day, the promised day of God transforms all into a new heaven and a new earth? 

Sacred authors maintain we have some say in titrating the mixture of patience required and promise achieved.  We can either accelerate or pump the brakes of the advent of peace and friendship among persons based on our readiness or refusal to keep our promises to one another. 

Despite our halfhearted resolve to “just get along” during the holidays with family and accidental acquaintances (like siblings’ newfound significant others), lurking not-too-far below the surface of our holiday pleasantries is our tendency to disregard, rather than abide, in relationship to God’s promise. We confront the fact that we have been selfish, willful, complacent.  This complacency is opposed to the sense of St. Thomas Aquinas, who speaks of the complacentia boni—the complacency of the good discovered but not yet fulfilled.  This reservoir of potential energy is to be a source irrigating our activity, a foretaste of friendship that alone quiets our hunger.

At Bethlehem, the House of Bread, the Word made flesh comes down from heaven to do the will of the Father. Jesus gives us what alone will stave our hunger and quench our thirst for perpetual presence, for God with us; he gives himself.  Even still, as the darkest days of the year weigh upon us, we look up and around, and see we are not so alone. There are choristers who cannot help but break into song, who lend their musical artistry and beauty to draw us out of ourselves, to keep us from retreating into a fetal position. There are persons in our midst whose patience and longsuffering help put our own life challenges into perspective, who broaden our field of vision and help us see how foolish we have been to think God will leave us to our own devices.  

We trace the movements of the conductors of holiness and devotion, the shepherds and others drawn from the margins into the heart of God’s mysteries, women and men whose humanity is fulfilled, known forever as friends of God. 

We are so bold to declare, “Fulfill the promise,” both as petition to the God who cannot be anything but faithful to his Word, AND as an Advent antiphon that reverberates within our own hearts. We are roused to live as the sort of persons we ought to be, whom we long to be. By God’s grace, we are rekindled in our desire to let God to work within hearts once frozen, in whom his message is inscribed by Spirit fire and faith. According to God’s prompting, as for Mary and Joseph, at Christmas we travel to the city (or, better, to the church) we thought we had left forever, only to find ourselves at home, at peace, in the presence of the Child born unto us.