• Numbers 6: 22-27
• Psalm 67: 2-3, 5-6, 8
• Galatians 4: 4-7
• Luke 2: 16-21

New Year’s Day comes next, and as you face 2012, with whatever mixture of eagerness and anxiety is yours, you will find much to ponder on in the readings for the feast; and you will see that what matters is that God (we do not know how) is at work in our world.

The first reading is the beautiful priestly blessing that is intended to accompany Israel in its desert wanderings. Each of the three parts of the blessing is longer than its predecessor. It moves from “YHWH bless you and keep you” to “YHWH lift up his face upon you and be gracious to you”, to “YHWH lift up his face upon you and  give you peace”, with some untranslatable Hebrew puns on the way, all culminating in the great promise “and I shall bless them”. This happens, of course, not because of any merit on our part, not because the magic formula has been properly carried out, but simply because God is God.

The psalm picks up this idea of God’s generous blessing: “may God be gracious to us and bless us, and let his face shine upon us” is how it begins; and it ends also with blessing: “may God bless us, and may all the ends of the earth fear him”. Here, of course, the idea is that the praise of God (in response to God’s blessing) goes out beyond Israel to all others who might learn about God from us. That is not a bad idea to take with us into the New Year, better than those dreadfully fragile resolutions made at midnight, and broken by midday.

The second reading for the great feast, coming just after some of the more difficult bits of argument in the Letter to the Galatians, and outlines what it is that God has done in Christ, labouring for our advantage in this broken world of ours. The phrase “the fullness of time” emphasises that God is in charge. The “right time” is when God says so, not when we think the time is ripe. Then Paul puts his finger on the central element of it: “God sent the Son of God”; but the argument is subtly done here, for it is qualified in two ways. First, Jesus is “born of a woman”, in other words a human being just like the rest of us, with all the limitations and ambiguities that implies. Secondly, Jesus is “under the Law”, which Paul in Galatians sees as a temporarily disadvantaged situation, a necessary preliminary if God in Christ is to move us from the status of “slave” to the status of “freeborn son or daughter”. How does this happen? Not through anything that we have achieved, but through the “Spirit of the Son”; and the function of that Spirit is “to cry out in our hearts, ‘Abba, Father’,” which of course is how Jesus began the prayer he taught his disciples, and how himself prayed in Gethsemane. The upshot is that we are “no longer slaves, but free-born sons and daughters, and therefore also heirs, through God”.

The gospel for the solemnity starts with the outsiders (shepherds) rushing off to witness the appearance of the baby which God’s messenger has told them about; and it ends with Jesus becoming an insider: “when the eight days had been fulfilled to circumcise him, his name was also called Jesus, which he had been called by the messenger before he had been conceived in the womb”. The reader is already aware, of course, that although Jesus and his parents belong firmly within Judaism, and Luke’s Gospel begins and ends in the Temple, by the end of the story of Acts there has been a sad divorce between Jesus’ followers and the Judaism from which they had emerged. So it is worth noticing what takes place between the beginning and the end of next Sunday’s gospel. First of all, the shepherds’ account causes “wonder”, a sure sign that God is at work. Secondly, Mary “kept all these words, comparing them in her heart”, inviting us likewise to reflect on “these words”. Thirdly the shepherds go off (not, apparently back to their unhappy sheep) “glorifying and praising God over all they had heard and seen, exactly as it was spoke to them”. God is at work here, and we shall best celebrate our new year if we learn to see the signs.