Christmas Day, Vigil Mass (2025) - Fr Robert Krishna, OP

Dominican Friars
Dec 23, 2025
3 min read

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

writes Philip Larkin in one of his poems. So, he says,

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

This can seem like an attractive solution. War and terrorism and massacres, racial and religious hatred, slavery and oppression and contempt, and the seeming lack of meaning or purpose in human life, all make humanity seem a project we’re better out of. But Abraham’s descendants, listed in today’s Gospel, didn’t think so. They had not been spared the darkness of the world, as we read in the Old Testament. Right from the beginning, one brother, Isaac, was favoured over the other, Ishmael, and Jacob deceived Esau his brother. Judah and his brothers trapped and tried to sell off Joseph, their brother, into slavery. They lost him and lied about it to their father. Judah and Tamar deceived each other, and Judah nearly had her killed before admitting his errors. David committed adultery; Solomon oppressed his people and was fickle towards God; the kings of Judah frequently turned away from God; then the disaster of the exile, and the slow rebuilding of the nation under external occupation and with frequent internal conflicts in the obscurity of all the names between Shealtiel and Joseph. Jesus himself was born under the threat of local persecution and lives under Roman occupation.

Yet, they continued to have children and survive through each generation. Matthew adds an editorial comment noting how regular these generations are, 14 generations after 14 generations. In the Jewish world view, the number 14 is very significant, linked to the 7 days of creation. Wanderings, sin, suffering, disaster, insignificance: God is present and bringing order to all this mess, Matthew is saying. He is not merely present in the sense that he brings good out of evil in the long run. That would be little consolation for us who must suffer the evils of our world. At Christmas, we celebrate that the Son of God did not remain alien to the suffering and the futility of human endeavour. In the flesh, he entered the messy history of his people, the sordid and sorry and often senseless history of humanity. In being born here, he entered our lot, out of place though he was in the world he created and sustained in being and we have disfigured through sin. The great Jewish poet, Joseph Brodsky, imagines in Christ,

the Lord, for the first time, from darkness, and stranded

immensely in distance, recognising Himself in the Son

of Man: homeless, going out to Himself in a homeless one.

But Jesus is not with us just as a fellow sufferer of the evils of the world, reassuring us that we’re not alone. He changes the world by giving himself to us, as a little child in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, in his body and blood consumed in the Eucharist, and in each other as members of the Body of Christ. He strengthens us and enables us to share in his setting the world to right: We see this already in Joseph, this fearful and vulnerable, yet just, man who takes on the task of guarding the infant Son of God and his mother. We see it in Matthew himself, who disregarding the shame of his own past betrayal of his people as a tax-collector proclaims the continuing, active, presence of God in the dark history of his people. We see it in Paul who, overcoming the guilt of his own past persecution of the Church, preaches that the Messiah has come. We see it in the prophet who proclaims the future glory of Jerusalem from a bunch of ruins inhabited by squatters returned from exile. And you and I are invited to join in God’s setting the world to right, to make his presence in the world a sensible, tangible reality in how we treat each other, and how we relate to God. Now we have something other than misery to hand to each other and to God, because God has given himself to us. With another English poet, St Robert Southwell, we now can say

Gift better than Himself God doth not know,

Gift better than his God no man can see;

This gift doth here the giver given bestow,

Gift to this gift let each receiver be:

God is my gift, Himself He freely gave me,

God's gift am I, and none but God shall have me.