 the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit. So God we are told in His innermost essence is not solitude. We keep wanting God to be this kind of distant guy with the long white beard on this big throne who's removed from us. But by revelation we know that God in His innermost essence is not solitude. God in His innermost essence is family, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And He is infinitely perfect and blessed in Himself. God doesn't need us to fix Him or update Him or reboot Him. God is infinitely perfect and blessed in Himself. In a plan of sheer goodness, God decided to create time and space. And within time and space He decided to bring forth creation to share the love that He already had within Himself. And He crowned His creation with the human being, with humanity. Male and female He created them. And He desired to lavish the human family with all the gifts that a good Father wants to give and pour into His children. And we know our first parents, Adam and Eve, they had remarkable spiritual gifts. For example, they never got sick and they were never supposed to die. Their bodies shared in the immortality of their soul. They had infused knowledge. If Adam decided that he was going to plant a new tree, all the knowledge he needed was instantly infused within his soul. And we know that their reason had total control over their passions. We know that our first parents, they walked with God. We are told in the Genesis account they walked with him in the breeze of the evening, having a close intimate relationship with God. What we call in theology, sanctifying grace. But here's what our first parents did. Rather than trusting in the God who was Father and companion and friend, who lavished upon them remarkable gifts, they instead chose to listen to whispered lies as the evil one entered the garden in the figurative language of the book of Genesis. And whispered to our first parents, why is God keeping this from you? Why is He keeping it down? It's better on the other side. He's repressing you. He's keeping something away from you because He knows that you will then be His equal. And their hearts were filled with pride and they rebelled against their Father. They responded to His generosity, His kindness, His love with arrogance and pride. We will take for ourselves what we want. We will rob the Divine Majesty and take it on our own terms. The figurative account of Genesis describes this as a tree being taken, excuse me, a fruit being taken from the tree of the knowledge of Good Nephal. Imagine a beautiful palace, beautiful, splendid. And someone throws a grenade into that palace. And the walls of the palace are just able to withstand the blast, but the entire palace is in chaos, total discord. That is exactly the consequence and our human nature of the original sin of our parents. This human nature that had been so endowed with so many blessings was thrown into complete disorder by our sin. Now we know that our passions wage war against our reason. We can know that something is wrong and yet still desire to do it. We can know that something is good that we should do and yet choose not to. We know that we don't have infused knowledge. We have to learn the hard way. And for some of us, we have to try to remember what we just learned, right? We also know that our bodies suffer the mortality of the material creation, which is why we get sick, which is why we will die. St. Paul telling us the wages of sin is death. This is why when one of our own, one of our loved ones dies, there's something inside of our soul that just says, this isn't right, this isn't fair. Exactly. We were never meant to die. But our bodies now share in the mortality of the material world. And we no longer have sanctifying grace. God, who was father and friend, has now become stranger. And because of our fallenness and the caricatures we form of him, God now becomes enemy. And that is the state of fallen humanity. Now, but left by ourselves, if our first parents were simply left with those penalties, those disciplines, the desolation they felt would easily have become despair, desolation of the heart because they knew what they had and they saw that it was lost. Why did we believe such lies? Why did we allow that to happen? And they saw that the friendship that God gave to them was taken away, even as they were removed from the garden. That desolation could easily have become despair, except God gave a promise. In the midst of his disciplines as a good father, he gave a promise, not simply the adminnive, but to the entire human family. He tells us in what we call the Proto Evangelium, the first gospel in the very accounts of the Garden of Eden, that one day a woman will be raised up and she will crush the head of the serpent who has done this. And her seed, her son, will reverse the effects of the curse. But this serpent will strike at his heel. So a Messiah, an anointed savior, will come. But he will be a wounded savior, a wounded victor. Dear friends, I think it's so important as Christians, we understand the utter importance of that promise because that promise is the entire basis of the whole of salvation history that God will say and has said, I will reverse the effects of this curse and I will bring about redemption. The support that we understand that promise was given to our first parents, passed through the generations and held by Noah, passed through the generations and held by Abraham and then passed through the generations. It's Abraham's grandson, Jacob, renamed by God, Israel. God conquers. That's a messed up family. You look at Jacob's family, it's messed up. Man has two wives, two concubines, long story there. The older sons hate the younger sons. One of them is even sold off into slavery. One brother rebels against his father. Two of them wage war against another people because of an offense to their sister. They put front in dysfunction. And you can imagine if all the families God could have chosen, he chose that family. Why? To display to us, if we think we've got it bad, look how God was able to fix this family. Also because God has chosen his firstborn. God went to the Israelites and he took that promise and he placed that promise within the patrimony of the Israelites. As God's chosen people, they were to protect and pass on that promise, even as God expanded it. He'll be to the fourth son of Jacob, Israel. His fourth son, Judah, who received that promise. We are told at the end of the book of Genesis that the scepter, the ruling staff, will never pass from Judah. That he will have the lions roar and he will feed on prey. He will be the ruler over his brothers. That's an expansion of the promise. Who is this wounded savior? Now a wounded savior who will come from Judah. And that promise is passed on to the time of the patriarchs and then it enters into the monarchy. And look at God raise up that son of Judah, David, the second king of Israel, the one blessed and chosen by God. Saul was chosen by the people. David is chosen by God. And he raises up David and he allows David's throne to be merged with the promise of Judah. David's throne itself becomes a prophecy, a sign of the Messiah that is to come, because now we know not simply a wounded savior, not simply from Judah, but a wounded savior of Judah of the house of David. And God begins to mold and shape the prophecies so that we might recognize the Messiah when he would come among us. Dozens and dozens of other prophecies are given so that we can clearly identify who the Messiah is when he is here. And then the fullness of time came. St. Paul tells us in the fullness of time, God sent his son born of a woman born under the law to redeem us. Look at that beautiful encounter between Gabriel and our lady today. And by extension the encounter with Joseph, as he's called to fidelity. I always think it's powerful with Joseph. Whenever we see him, he's surrounded by angels and he always obeys. He was God's go-to man because he did what was ever, whatever was asked. But imagine that encounter between our lady and Gabriel. When Gabriel says to our lady, and hear these words, let them echo in your heart if you do not have them memorized, that your son will be holy, the son of God. He will sit on the throne of David, his father. And he will rule over the house of Jacob forever. And all of his kingdom, there will be no end. Dear friends, I hope that just in the summary of salvation history, which is a variation of the one given by St. Paul in our second reading, that you can begin to understand how God molded and shaped and brought all things together so that when Gabriel announced the coming of the Christ, we would be ready, that we would be ready and be able to recognize him and know him and trust him. Because dear friends, what we celebrate today on Christmas is that God in fulfillment of every prophecy and promise throughout salvation history sent his son in order to redeem us, sent us the Messiah. We could never have imagined that the Messiah that had been promised would be God himself. That God would send his own son to be that wounded victor. And he came and dwelt among us working with human hands, loved with the human heart, cried human tears in order to show us how to live as the children of God. And then fulfilling his call, he became the wounded savior as he allowed himself to be brutally tortured, crucified, and to die for our salvation. The wood of the cradle, pointing to the wood of the cross, the man born for one reason and for one purpose, to fulfill the promises of God and to open for us the door of salvation. And dear friends, the Lord Jesus comes among us on this Christmas day, fulfilling every promise, knowing that we can trust God, trust his plan in order to bring about our salvation. But we have to open wide the doors of our hearts. The devil, the devil has been busy. Oh my goodness, this man, this creature works so hard. Look at what the devil has done. How many Christian hearts are worried about some fat man in a red suit or root off the red nose reindeer or frosty the snowman to hell with all of them? How distracted the faithful have become to the central mystery of our faith. God has become a man in order to bring about our salvation. So easy to get distracted. It's so easy to allow other narratives into our minds and hearts. And to them into the minds and hearts of young Christians. It grieves me when children, Christian children, know every reindeer of some Santa Claus, but they do not know the story of Judah or David. And they don't really know what's happened in Bethlehem. What have we done? Have we allowed ourselves to become puppets to the evil one? To fill this sacred day with such passing secular trash? Is that what we have become? To replace the living God and his work of salvation with some paganistic fable? Is that what we have done? I think this pandemic has taken so much from us. I think it's a call to purification. A call for us to refocus on what's important. As God has taken things from us, we can look at our own hearts and ask, what have we allowed in our hearts? To what have we opened our hearts? What's in there? What do we think are the important or the sacred things? And maybe as this pandemic has taken so many things, perhaps the silver lining is this examination that we can realize. My goodness, I've allowed so many other things to distract my thoughts and my affections and my excitement and my joy on the feast of the birth of my Savior, of my Savior. And today the Lord calls us back to himself as he announces to each of us the saving message that he offers to each one of us, that darkness can be dispelled, brokenness can be healed, sorrow can be turned to joy, sin has been vanquished, and death has been overturned. We are the children of God. We are not the children of darkness. We are not the children of chaos. We are not the children of COVID. We are the children of God. And he has come and sought us out. He is the faithful Almighty God to fulfill his promise and to bring about our salvation. We have to open up our hearts, get all the idols out, and allow Jesus to come in and allow his grace to work. I wish we all could fully know how deeply God loves each one of us and how tremendously he desires for us to be with him in eternal fellowship, to be a part of that divine family of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But he loves us enough to respect our freedom. And so many are willing to replace the divine promises for the porridge and the passing things of our world today. We have to reorder our hearts, realign our affections, and redirect our focus and our attention on Jesus Christ. Because today, dear friends, the Son of God is born in Bethlehem for you, for you, for me, for each one of us. And he comes on a ransom mission. He's here in order to save us. But we have to acknowledge that we need to be saved. We have to make sure that our hearts are ready to receive him. And we have to let him work. As we celebrate this mass tonight, I hope that you will open your hearts, that you will ask for the grace of faith, deeper faith, that you will allow God to give you a hope that nothing in this world can give you and we can't even give ourselves, that you will allow God to begin the work of salvation in your heart and in your homes. Because we are the children of God, greatly beloved, sought after. And he comes to us today. Our task is to open our hearts, let him in, say yes, and let our salvation begin.