Homilies & Thoughts

A house can be holy and still be hurried. Picture Joseph waking in the dark, heart pounding, listening to a message that feels like both mercy and emergency. There is no time for long conversations, no time to tidy loose ends. A child is lifted, a mother gathers what she can, and a family slips into the night—because God has chosen to save the Savior by sending him away.

The startling part is where they go: Egypt. Not the postcard Egypt of museums and pyramids, but the Egypt that lives in Israel’s memory: the place of slavery, the furnace of temptation, the land from which they once begged to be freed. It had become a symbol for everything that crushes and corrupts. And yet the angel says, “Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you.”

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.

Tonight the story begins with paperwork: a ruler’s signature, a decree, an empire’s gears turning. Caesar Augustus wants the world enrolled. Not because he is curious, but because names on a register become taxes, and taxes become leverage. Rome calls this order. Rome calls this peace. Rome even calls it, in its own way, salvation.

Augustus knew the power of religious language. He was Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar; when Julius was officially declared a god, Augustus became the son of god. The title sounded like heaven, but it served the throne. The Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome, was real—roads were safer, borders steadier—but it rested on the threat of the sword. Revolts were crushed. Crosses lined the roads. Fear did a great deal of Rome’s governing.

Joseph falls asleep with a decision already made. He has weighed the options, tried to keep his conscience clean, tried to do the least damage. He is a righteous man, and that righteousness does not make the situation simple. It makes it heavier.

Then God interrupts his careful plan—not with thunder, not with certainty, but with a dream. And the angel speaks a sentence that is almost startling, because the Gospel does not use the word “fear” until the angel names it: “Do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home.”

Two images of the Resurrection—one traditional, one contemporary—reveal more than artistic taste. A Renaissance anachronism quietly proclaims the Incarnation: Christ rose for every age, not only first-century Jerusalem. But when modern soldiers and concrete appear around the empty tomb, many of us flinch. Why? This reflection explores that discomfort, exposing how easily we confine faith to the past, and invites us to see the risen Lord as present here and now—judging, redeeming, and remaking our world.

Most of us spend our lives building walls. Not stone walls, usually. Although we certainly know fences, locks, and passwords. We build personal walls. We retreat into routine and hide inside busyness; we reassure ourselves, “I’ve got it handled.” That is how life stays manageable, predictable, and even pleasant. And if we’re not careful, God is treated the same way—tidy and familiar, safely kept at arm’s length.

Then Advent arrives like a cold wind at the gate. Jesus praises John the Baptist, and he asks the crowd one question: “What did you go out to the desert to see?” The word we hear as “desert” is better understood as “wilderness.” And the wilderness is not a scenic backdrop. It is outside the city’s protection, beyond the lamps and the watchmen. It is where you are exposed—to the elements, to hunger, to danger, to uncertainty, to your own limits.

Before sunrise on a December morning, an ordinary man walked the road toward mass on the hill of Tepeyac. He was not a governor, not a soldier, not a spokesman for a cause. Juan Diego was simply faithful—poor, overlooked, living in a world torn open by conquest, suspicion, and fear.

That is precisely where Our Lady chose to appear.

Guadalupe does not arrive as a badge for one side. She comes as Mother—Madre de Dios—for a wounded, divided society. Her presence says: you are not merely rivals, classes, or camps. You are children. One Mother, many peoples. She speaks to Juan Diego in a way he can receive, and she sends him back into the conflict with a task larger than himself.

By candlelight, these four Advent reflections trace a path from wakefulness to repentance, from fragile faith to renewed trust. Beginning with Jesus’ warning to stay awake, they move through John’s call to bear fruit, Christ’s assurance that grace is truly at work, and the quiet courage of Joseph. Together they invite us to let God enter ordinary life, weakness, and uncertainty, so the light of Emmanuel can be born anew.

Many of us might admit that this Jubilee Year of Hope has passed quietly by. It is on the Church’s calendar, but not always on our minds. Yet the very idea of a Jubilee is to interrupt ordinary time, to shake loose the dust that settles over our faith, and to let God do something new within us.

Into that same kind of spiritual drowsiness steps John the Baptist. He does not arrive gently. He is rough, strange, even unsettling: camel hair on his shoulders, the dust of the desert on his feet, wild insects for food. God chooses this man precisely because he cannot be ignored. His very presence is a question: have you grown too comfortable in your faith?

Advent arrives like an alarm clock in the dark. The world keeps moving at its usual pace—work and meals, holidays and travel, screens glowing late into the night—yet the Lord gently shakes our shoulder and gives a single, urgent command: “Therefore, stay awake!”

When Jesus speaks of the days of Noah, he does not describe spectacular sins. He speaks of people eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage. Ordinary life. Good things, but lived as if God were unnecessary. People so absorbed in what was immediately in front of them that they never lifted their eyes to what was coming toward them. The flood did not surprise them because it was hidden; it surprised them because they were spiritually asleep.

The throne of our King does not look like a throne. It is a cross planted outside the city, with a crude sign nailed above his head and a handful of people watching while the crowd mocks and walks away. The rulers scoff, the soldiers make jokes, even a dying criminal joins in. It looks like weakness and failure.

Yet this is the moment when the true King of the Universe is revealed. The eternal Son of the Father has emptied himself, born of a woman, obedient even to this shameful death. And precisely here, when every earthly measure says he has lost, he begins to reign. One man sees it. One man, condemned justly by his own admission, looks at the crucified Jesus and recognizes a King. He turns and says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

A cathedral on Rome’s Lateran Hill—St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome—bears the name “Mother and Head of all churches in Rome and in the world.” Today the Church celebrates the dedication of that cathedral. Strange, perhaps, to keep a feast for a building. Yet the Church asks us to do so because what we dedicate in stone reveals what God desires to do in us. Walls and doors cannot contain God. He fills heaven and earth. Still, he gives us a place set apart so our scattered hearts can be gathered, our senses focused, our lives reoriented toward him.