Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.

The declaration of the angels, which we sing out anew after putting aside the Gloria in the past Sundays of Advent, summarizes well the gift of Christmas. In the first words, Glory to God in the highest, the angels praise God for the wondrous gift of this night, which reveals us the truth (if we are not aware) that God is a God of unexpected blessings. I never could have imagined all the blessings I have received in my first 6 months of priestly ministry: WYD, Holy Land, warm welcome from the pastor (away in Italy for first 11 days!), great help of parish staff and the faithful who have smiled and endured all my little mistakes and my difference in personality (especially those marriage couples who never met me!). Also, though, the great gift of ministering in the person of Christ, particularly in the sacraments: praying the Mass, baptizing, anointing the ill or infirm, and forgiving sins in Confession. This last one has been a special Advent gift from God: I have ministered over 50 hours of confession during Advent, and what a gift it is to be present there when God reconciles a soul to himself and fills it with His Love. Indeed, God's love has become present to me in such unimaginable ways. Glory to God in the highest. The most unimaginable blessing of all happened two-thousand years ago, in a small town of a small people, in a stable-cave, with noone but his parents and a few shepherds present. This miraculous blessing that we celebrate today is unexpected in many ways: first, it was not expected by Mary or Joseph the Annunciation was a surprise to them because they weren't even married yet. Also, it was a surprise because the Messiah shouldn't have such humble beginnings: born on the fringe of the empire, poor, homeless, without any worldly fanfare. Finally, it was a surprise because the Messiah, this little child, is God himself: For Israel, God was not to be depicted in any images He was completely other. As we say in our Creed (the new translation): he is maker all things, visible and invisible, and stood outside of that creation. The Jewish people knew that God our creator who loves us is present everywhere, and He does not need to manifest Himself physically to be close to us. Yet, this is exactly what God does, he condescends in loving humility to step into the world he has created, becoming one of us, subject to our finite realities of time, place, and suffering. Would we ourselves ever freely become an ant or a tree? This shows exactly the love of God, who is a God of unexpected blessings. Now this doesn't mean there isn't a tinge of suffering and crosses in life indeed we all know very well the pain our imperfect world can bring: caused both from personal sin and from Original Sin. But that pain, those evils we have to suffer, are given a limit in this little child. And this is perhaps the greatest blessing, the most unexpected blessing we have received: the hope that in Jesus, Emmanuel (God-withus), we can find the way to a world and an everlasting life that is free from the pain

and suffering of our current experience. That is the peace that the angels proclaim: ...on earth peace to people of good will. Peace is the greatest of gifts, because it shows that all is rightly ordered: man is right with God, right with himself, right with others, right with the world. Indeed, more unexpected, is that the gift of peace is not held out to us as only a future reality in heaven: to those who are in God's grace and drawing closer to Him daily in their prayer and good works, God gives us a foretaste of that future promise of heaven: in all the sacraments of the Church, especially in the greatest of these sacraments which is God himself, God-with-us, we are able to experience the great peace of heaven, our ultimate communion with God in our Holy Communion of the Eucharist. This is exactly what God came to us for: to be given to us out of love. The wood of the cross and the bread of the Eucharist are foreshadowed in this stable-cave, in the bed of the God-child: a wooden manger filled with hay. Indeed, the city of David, Israel's great shepherd-king, is called Bethlehem, which means house of bread, where our Eucharistic Lord, the shepherd-king who is God-among-us is born this night. The Lord's Incarnation is oriented toward the cross and the Eucharist, which makes that cross present to us now, in our own time and place. Not even the great faith of Mary could ever have imagined such a gift, such an unexpected blessing. At the sight of such a wonderful mystery of our loving God, we can only humbly and loving receive our Lord with the angels' words on our lips: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.