Homily for December 17, 2019

Even though Christmas is the celebration of Jesus’ birth, it took about 300 years before His birth was formally celebrated by the Church.

Christmas and Advent are the newest additions to our liturgical calendar. While the early Church celebrated the LORD’s Resurrection from its very beginnings, the first reference to a celebration of the LORD’s birth is dated between the years 274 and 336. The Romans observed an annual festival called Sol Invictus – the “Birthday of the Invincible Sun,” celebrated on what was then the shortest day of the year, December 25th. It was the first day of the new sun – from then on, daylight would extend longer and longer.

As Christianity grew throughout the Roman world, the Church adopted the Birthday of the Invincible Sun to celebrate the dawning of the Son of God. Over the next centuries, the liturgical season of Advent developed as a time of prayer and preparation for Christmas.

In today’s Gospel, Matthew compiles a genealogy of Jesus’ ancestors. Both Matthew’s account of Jesus’ ancestry and the early Church’s adoption of the date of the pagan festival of the sun celebrate our belief that Jesus is the fulfillment of a world that God envisioned from the first moment of creation, a world created in the justice and peace of its Creator. Jesus dawns upon our world as a “new” sun to illuminate it once again in the peace and justice of God. +