Christmas Eve Midnight Mass (December 24, 2023)

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Almost every Sunday at Holy Communion and on most Feast days, the Church sings the Gloria at the end of the Holy Communion service (or at its more traditional place earlier in the service after “Lord have mercy upon us”). We will sing it tonight for the first time in this new church year since the First Sunday in Advent. It’s great that we sing it, but one of the problems with singing it so often is that we risk forgetting whence it originates: the song the angels sing on Christmas when announcing the birth of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to the angels. It was undoubtedly a song that Mary pondered in her heart throughout Jesus’ life until the meaning became abundantly clear. And now, this is one of the great anthems of the Church…but what does it mean?

“Glory to God in the highest.” Put yourself in the place of an angel who was there as God created this beautiful world. You saw him make everything, culminating in humanity, a race that you love because it bears the image of God. But then you saw the horror of sin, the defacing of that image, and the rebellion that came along with it. In the wake of this falling out, you watched, and even participated, as God promised a coming redemption through the Law and the Prophets. And now, on this night, the child of promise is born, the plan is being actualized, and the whole choir cannot help but sing praises to God because “born this night in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord”, the sign of God’s great love for us. How can God not be praised? We can think of the great heavenly worship in Revelation: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain!” And as time marches on, this choir gets bigger and bigger as more and more faithful souls are added to it, joining their voices to the angels.

“Peace on Earth.” After rendering glory to God, the angels now declare “Peace on earth” because, with the arrival of the Christ child, the rupture between God and man is healed. Sin and rebellion didn’t damage or harm God, but it left us, his creation, reeling in instability and restlessness. The Fall turned us inward against ourselves and locked us into a struggle and violence. And we see this struggle throughout Scripture: Adam and Eve turned against each other; Cain murdered his brother Abel; the tensions between Isaac and Ishmael were exacerbated; and we saw it in the early Church as the Jews struggled with the question of Gentile inclusion. These cycles perpetuate into our own day. You don’t have to read the news for long before you see otherization, marginalization, and violence. But these cycles can be broken. How?

The answer comes in the final stanza of the heavenly hymn: “Good will towards men.” In the Incarnation, Jesus goes beyond repairing our brokenness. In him, we’re not merely pardoned, we are “in Christ” and, as a result, we receive manifold blessings. Because we are “in Christ,” we are able to go to him and ask him, our Brother, for anything we want or need. “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” (Jas 1:5). We have been made Partakers of the Divine Nature. What more could we ever need?

Too often, we don’t give God the honor and glory that he’s owed. That’s why we need to keep this great anthem before us, it’s why we need to sing it at Mass. But it’s also why we need to keep that baby in the manger always before us, remembering that he isn’t an angel or just a really great human; this is “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God.” Heed his call that we pick up our crosses and follow him because one day we will have to answer to him at the final judgment. And so our lives should be lived in such a perpetual doxology as we sing along with the angels:

“Glory to God in the highest”: We cannot forget his greatness, power, or majesty or the mighty works that wrought our salvation.

“Peace on earth”: The great Prayer of St. Francis recognizes that we are called to be instruments of God’s peace in the world. “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness joy. Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”

And finally “Good will towards men”: We do not fight evil with evil, but bless those who persecute us.

John Keble: “You children of men had rebelled against your God: hHe had turned to be your enemy; and had fought against you; but from this day forward He is your friend again. How should it be otherwise, since His dear Son is become one of you? God is now made Man: how, then, can He choose but love man? How can you doubt henceforth that you may be at peace with Him since He has taken your nature to be part of himself to sanctify it here by doing and suffering all his adorable Will, and then to carry it up with Him to the highest heaven, and set it at His Father’s Right Hand, far above all of us Angels, and every name that is named of created things?”

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.