Before the time of prayer we must put ourselves in the state of mind we would wish to have in us when we actually pray. It is an inexorable fact that the condition of the soul at the time of prayer depends upon what shaped it beforehand.
JOHN CASSIAN Conferences 10.14
Cross out the word ‘discouragement’ from your dictionary of love; the more you feel your weakness and the difficulty of recollecting yourself, and the more hidden the Master seems, the more you must rejoice, for then you are giving to Him…. What does it matter what we feel; He is the unchanging one…. He loves you today as He loved you yesterday and will love you tomorrow.
ELIZABETH OF THE TRINITY
FLIGHT INTO EGYPT
(Sir 3:2-6, 12-14; Col 3:12-21; Mt 2:13-15, 19-23)
December 28, 2025
And the Word was made flesh, and he pitched his tent among us (Jn 1:14). Yes, the Son of the most high God chose to live right in the midst of our lowly lives, just as they are right now, filled as they are with all manner of wonders, sorrows and incongruities. He loved us so much that he ardently desired to take upon himself all the consequences of sharing our lives totally, intimately, holding nothing back. Though we do not see him materially, nothing in the universe is more intimately and vividly present to us than Christ Jesus, the Word made man, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, in whom and for whom we were created. Therefore, as we see in the gospel we have just heard, from the very beginning Jesus’ life on earth was marked by neediness, threats and hostility, just like the lives of the most vulnerable human beings among us.
In her liturgy of the first Sunday after Christmas today, the Church invites us to contemplate the event of the Incarnation not in the sublime and eternal manifestation of St John’s Prologue, as on Christmas morning, but rather as reflected in the nitty-gritty reality and circumstances of the peculiar family into which the Son of the eternal Father was humanly born. Today we behold Christ simultaneously both in his dazzling “glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14), and as a vulnerable Babe sheltered in his blessed Mother’s gentle arms, having to be carried off hastily into foreign lands in order to survive this world’s violence.
Although the theme of “the family” is, thus, very relevant on this Sunday, it must be said that this gospel of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt by no means offers us an idealized portrait of a middle-class family from the first world, secure in its autonomy and comfortable in its enjoyment of privileged status, though Jesus is the royal heir of King David, and thus has every right to entitlement. In the Christian dispensation and according to Jesus’ very words, the decisive reality presented to us in the Holy Family as our model is the new family of Jesus, the unheard-of society, at once human and divine, which our Lord came into the world to create: that is, the supernatural family of his disciples, gathered around him by the proclamation of the Word of God—Jesus himself—and founded not primarily on the strength of blood ties but on the Trinitarian power of “doing the will of God” in synergy with the Word Incarnate.
“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”, Jesus once asked. And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Mt 12:48-50). Unique and irreplaceable as Joseph and Mary are in their persons and in the crucial roles they play in the life of the Infant Jesus, our Lord’s parents are, above all, Christian disciples to whom the Word of God has been proclaimed by angels, entrusted to them by the Holy Spirit in a super-eminent manner in enfleshed form. And, before our very eyes, they are being radically transformed by the event. As such, the blessed Mother of God and her God-appointed husband are wholly intent on serving God’s plan of salvation through Jesus. They are not at all seeking to fit conventionally into the social expectations of their clan and culture.
The chronic contradictoriness that Jesus brings into the human lives that welcome him is already writ large in the distressing perplexity of both Mary and Joseph as they try to deal with the mystery of the Incarnation invading their lives and beginning to shape their existence together in strange ways. Whether they like it or not, the hidden identity of their Son as Savior of the world is involving them massively in the tumultuous events of world history, although naturally speaking they would desire nothing more than to offer their newborn Son a tranquil and harmonious domesticity. But the Father in heaven has other, riskier plans which he reveals only gradually, as they are able to accept them.
The event portrayed in today’s gospel is traditionally called “The Flight into Egypt”. Though the word “flight” can connote cowardice, on this particular occasion we can, rather, observe Joseph exercising an array of virtues through his decision to take his family and flee. The poor and destitute don’t often have much choice in such matters. We see here displayed virtues such as anguished discernment of a course of action, courage in the face of mighty threats, humility in admitting his own and his wife’s limitations, resistance to the onslaught of evil, responsibility for the task entrusted to him… But all of these admirable virtues are really only practical aspects of the central theological virtue of faith, more specifically flight into the unknown as an act of obedient faith, as with all the patriarchs beginning with Abraham.
Matthew records that the angel of the Lord appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him to flee to Egypt. This expression, “angel of the Lord appeared”, refers to a providential intervention by God in human affairs that comes mercifully to resolve a desperate situation, when all seems lost and there appears to be no way out. In the first two chapters of Matthew, in fact, the angel of the Lord intervenes to this purpose no fewer than three times: first, to resolve Joseph’s dilemma and guide him to take Mary as his wife; second, to urge him to flee to Egypt with the Child and his Mother; and, third, to tell Joseph to bring Jesus and Mary back to the land of Israel after the danger is past. There is no doubt that Joseph is a saint who habitually lives in intimate and frequent communication with God, because his fidelity and humility enable him to do so.
These multiple interventions of the angel of God demonstrate what high stakes the Lord God of Israel holds in the evolving story of Yeshúa‘ ben Yosef. The reason for such personal involvement by God is that this story is nothing other than the personal living-out by Jesus of the whole history of the People of God, to whom the Lord refers in Exodus as “Israel my firstborn son” (4:22). Israel had gone down to Egypt of old to escape extinction by famine, and had then returned to take possession of the land of Israel. It is as if all of salvation history is now being recapitulated in the person and concrete story of little baby Yeshúa‘ ben David. By saving his own dear family from imminent danger Joseph, whether he knows it or not, is also safeguarding the wh0le history of God’s salvation of humanity. Yet he strives not to understand clearly and to command sovereignly, but only to love and obey and care for. Incredible to our ears and reason, the salvation of the world, Christ Jesus, was now astoundingly held in the hands of Mary and Joseph.
I don’t know whether you noticed, but our reading today from the lectionary curiously omits three verses in the middle of our flight-into-Egypt story, the verses that refer to the extermination of those we call the Holy Innocents, whose feast day falls on December 28 and this year is naturally overshadowed by that of the Holy Family: Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men (Mt 2:16). Matthew portrays this slaughter of the Innocents as an intrinsic part of the Jesus mystery and story, both as a retrospective allusion to the extermination in ancient times by Pharaoh of the children of the Hebrews and as a prefiguration of the redemptive death of Jesus himself on the cross.
Through their unselfconscious martyrdom, the Holy Innocents play the providential role of sparing the life of Baby Jesus for the moment, so that he can grow to maturity and perform his work of redemption. These children bear the most resounding witness possible to Jesus as Savior but they do so, as the Latin hymn says, non loquendo sed moriendo (“not by speaking but by dying”), a motto that should be dear to us monks. With their tender bodies the slain Innocents literally form a shield around the sacred body of Jesus, to “save” him for a more transcendental death at the appointed time of the Father’s own choosing.
So it is that the one who, according to the angel, “will save his people from their sins” is the very one who himself first had to be saved by his parents’ devoted care {and the substitution of baby martyrs}. In this way, and at the prompting of divine grace, Joseph and Mary saved the Savior physically so that he could one day save the world spiritually. Thus is each disciple called to co-operate in a peculiar way in the task of the world’s redemption! In fact, considering the present state of our world, it is impossible for our Christian hearts not to hear the Holy Family knocking at our door on their flight into dark exile. They are, in fact, knocking loudly and urgently right now at the door of our conscience in the persons of today’s persecuted children of God, whom dire poverty and political hatreds are driving out of their lands into the vast and grim unknown.
Just as Christ, as Pascal affirmed, will “hang on the cross until the end of time”, so will the Holy Family always be fleeing into precarious exile on this earth with us as eyewitnesses. Shall we be indifferent bystanders or ardent participants and helpers in the drama of Jesus, Mary and Joseph as lived in the lives of today’s fleeing refugees?
With astounding precision our Holy Father, in his Christmas message on Thursday, underscored the pressing relevance to our contemporary world of the Holy Family’s ordeals. Pope Leo insists that, “in becoming man, Jesus took upon himself our fragility, identifying with each one of us: with those who have nothing left and have lost everything, like the inhabitants of Gaza; with those who are prey to hunger and poverty, like the Yemeni people; with those who are fleeing their homeland to seek a future elsewhere”; and he adds that, as we Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus, we should remember that the Lord of the universe “accepted poverty and rejection, identifying himself with those who are discarded and excluded”. And Jesus did this not once or twice but on a permanent and irreversible basis. Note, for instance, that even after returning from Egypt to the land of Israel, Joseph was still afraid to go back to Judea; and so he cautiously took the Holy Family into an internal exile in far off Nazareth in northern Galilee. Indeed, more absolutely speaking, in this world the Son of Man truly “has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20).
I think you will agree that something essential would be glaringly missing from our faith as Christians, and the joy and gratitude we feel at Christmas would border on the shallow, if we failed to see the luminous presence of our blessed Lord in the millions of human beings on this planet today who on a daily basis are ravaged by poverty, rejection, injustice, hunger, disease and persecution, and who often enough must fear for their very lives and the lives of their innocent children—one and all glorious yet suffering images of God whom rapacious men (some of whom style themselves “faithful Christians”) choose to label as “disposable garbage” so as to get them out of their world-conquering path. What else is the holy Incarnation we celebrate in this season all about if not about Jesus’ free and generous identification of his divine Person with human beings, above all with each and every person who suffers? And how shall we, who aspire to be his eager followers, react to this presence of our beloved Lord in the lowly manger of outcast yet precious human lives?
To live without hope, to barely subsist feeling abandoned by all, must be the most terrible of all human tragedies. We, who are blessed with an abundance of hope through the gift of faith in the newborn Christ and in the Holy Trinity— we must become hope and light for those submerged in despair. We ought never forget the tremendous paradox that the spiritual treasures we possess, received without cost, by sheer grace and through no merit of ours, can continue to be possessed only by being given away. The key to the paradox is that these treasures we possess are nothing other than God’s dynamic life active within us, demanding to be shared.
Brother and sisters, during the octave before Christmas, we prayed the following words from the preface: “…The Virgin Mother longed for him with love beyond all telling…” On this Christmas night, enveloped as we are by the great mystery of God become man, let us try to enter into Our Lady’s love beyond all telling: What moved her to so great a love? How did she express this love? And how can we share in this exchange of love? Her love beyond all telling includes her desire that we, too, should share in the great mystery of our religion, that is, her Child Jesus who is our God and savior, Christ and Lord.
Of course, Our Lady did not approach mystery of the incarnation with the erudition of a Church Father. She was a young woman, a simple Jewish maiden and wife, and in the last days of her pregnancy. I assume she would have been familiar, at least to some extent, having listened to her parents and the synagogue liturgy, with the words we have just heard proclaimed: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom, a light has shone.” Darkness and gloom are all too present in our world today, but what seems to have inspired her love beyond all telling was God’s fidelity. God is faithful. God wants to penetrate the gloom of this world and bring to light the mystery that surrounds us. He, indeed, shows his fidelity by binding the strong one, that is, the devil, retrieving his spoils, and smashing the rod of this taskmaster that afflicts us; but even more, he shows his fidelity by the gift of a little child, his only begotten Son. At the same time, he shows us the matching gift of a woman who accepted the call to bear this child. We have here a mutual exchange of love that is beyond all telling.
In the second reading we heard another reason for Our Lady’s love: “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation…” The Lord could not have made his grace more tangible then in this pregnant woman whose time had come to have her child. Who could understand this grace better than Mary. She never had relations with a man, but by God’s grace she was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit as in the days of old when the cloud covered the meeting tent and led the Israelites through the desert. Now, the glory of the Lord is manifested to us by a child in a manger lying beside his mother. This is the blessed hope we await, “the appearance of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ…” But why did our Lady long for this manifestation of God’s grace with such longing? I think she was inspired by God’s desire that “all people be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” God’s desire for our salvation was the source of Our Lady’s love beyond all telling. She realized she had received the grace to bear the Prince of Peace who could bring God’s desire to fulfillment despite all the efforts to destroy it. This holy virgin was the first to know this tangible, overwhelming grace that has appeared and she wants to share it.
Finally, after the child is born, we hear this phrase repeated in the Gospel narrative: “She wrapped him in swaddling clothes…you will find an infant in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger…” Women know how to care for newborns, to keep them warm and safe in swaddling bands. These bands serve as a transition from the warmth and security of the mother’s womb to the environment of the outside world. How intimate a scene. Mary was not a passive spectator, but an active cooperator. Our Lady’s time had finally come to see with her own eyes the mystery hidden for ages or at least for 9 months in her womb. The intimacy and care she lavished on her son were certainly love beyond all telling.
Today’s Christmas mystery is certainly an exchange of love beyond all telling, beginning with the fidelity of God’s mercy and the reciprocal fidelity of the Virgin Mother, who is full of grace and truth. With her help we, too, have seen a great light that drives out darkness and gloom. It is reflected back to us in the mutual love of Our Lady and her child. Let us rejoice in this exchange of love and join the angels in singing “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
Of old, God the incorporeal and formless was never depicted, but now that God has been seen in the flesh and has associated with humankind, I depict what I have seen of God. I do not venerate matter, I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake and accepted to dwell in matter and through matter worked salvation, and I will not cease from referencing matter through which my salvation was worked.
SAINT JOHN DAMASCENE
Merry Christmas from all of us here at St. Joseph's Abbey!
Mother church places John the Baptist before her children precisely as we are preparing for Christmas for a good reason…. His life and message remind us that Advent is not yet Christmas—that this penitential time leads to joy only if we heed it's message. John the Baptist—who leaped for joy in his mother's womb—is joy's perfect messenger because he shows us it's necessary elements: Repentance, humility, and sacrifice.
FR. PAUL SCALIA
Let us arise, then. Let us shake the sleep out of our eyes—the sleep of emotions run amuck; the sleep of indifference, of tepidity, of self-pity, of fighting God… Let us arise from that sleep…and begin our journey to Bethlehem. But let us understand that this Bethlehem we seek is within our own souls, our own hearts…. It is an inner pilgrimage, a pilgrimage in which we don't use our feet…. So, then, let us enter, you and I, into the pilgrimage that doesn't take us from home. For ours is a journey of the spirit, which is a thousand times harder than a journey of the feet. Let us “arise and go.”
SERVANT OF GOD CATHERINE DE HUECK DOHERTY