Most of us will spend Christmas afternoon doing something wonderfully unglamorous: rinsing dishes, finding the missing piece to a toy, checking on an older relative, driving home in the dark. It can feel almost jarring to hear the Church speak, on a day like this, about eternity, glory, and the mystery of God.
And yet that is exactly where Christmas aims—right at the ordinary.
We sometimes imagine the Incarnation as a kind of divine fireworks show: a miracle meant to prove that God is powerful, and a ladder meant to lift us out of this world and into the next. If that is all it is, then the best Christian life would be the one that escapes the mess: less work, fewer meals, fewer conversations, fewer interruptions—just “spiritual” things.
But Christmas tells a different story. God does not treat human life as a waiting room we must endure. He does not look at our routines with disgust, as if they were beneath him. He enters them. The heart of this feast is not that we finally found a way up to heaven, but that heaven has leaned down into our very human lives. As the Gospel says, “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
Think about what that means. God chose lungs that had to breathe, hands that had to learn, a stomach that got hungry. He chose a family, neighbors, a language, and a hometown where people knew his ordinary face. For years—most of his earthly life—Jesus is not preaching to crowds or calming storms. He is growing. He is listening. He is working. He is sharing meals. He is living a human life so normal that it would have looked uneventful from the outside.
So Christmas is not a call to despise the world; it is God declaring that human life is worth saving, worth sanctifying. In Jesus, the natural and the supernatural are not enemies. They are joined. And that changes how we see our days.
It means that going to work can be holy—not because the job is glamorous, but because love can be practiced there with honesty and patience. It means that a family dinner can be holy, even with noise and tension, because forgiveness can happen at that table, and peace can be chosen again. It means that a conversation with a friend can be holy when we listen without rushing, when we tell the truth gently, when we refuse to tear down someone who isn’t present.
This is how Christians “sanctify the world”—not by demanding constant extraordinary signs, but by living the ordinary with a grateful, steady heart. Every time you offer thanks instead of complaint, you make space for grace. Every time you reconcile instead of keeping score, you let God’s light leak into a dark corner. Every time you comfort someone, you cooperate with the tenderness God has for this world.
In a few moments we will receive the Lord who chose flesh. Then we will walk back into our real lives—the sink, the road, the phone call, the hard conversation, the quiet loneliness. Christmas is telling us: do not treat any of it as meaningless.
So ask for this gift today: the courage to be truly human in the way Jesus was human—peaceful, grateful, reconciling, full of love. That is not a small holiness. That is the holiness we celebrate today.