Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Zechariah speaks in today’s gospel, “Blessed be the God of Israel. He has come to His people and set them free. He has fulfilled His promise that He promised of all that He would save us from our enemies, from the hands of all who hate us.”  At long last, the promise of God is fulfilled. God becomes man. God is born.
And yet, from the very beginning, from the day that our Lord is born, it strikes us—or it should strike us—how brief His life on earth is. The eternal God in the fullness of time becomes man and spends only 33 years on earth and almost entirely in obscurity.
So many years of waiting. So few years of presence on earth in the flesh.
So God truly makes His dwelling among us, and yet His dwelling is clearly not of this world. Here, God Himself has no lasting city.
And I wouldn’t want this to be misunderstood because the amazing thing about God is that He makes Himself present, and with the Incarnation, even more present. God’s presence is real, ever available. At every moment, we can turn to Him. He is really there without fail.
But at the same time, this presence is marked by a transience. It’s an already, but an already that’s not fulfilled yet. A presence that endures for the time of this world, but points beyond it.
So in this sense, God has no permanent city, no permanent abode here on earth, and neither do we. The earthly life of the Lord is brief, and so too is ours. Our short life is lived under the horizon of the last things: death, judgment, heaven, hell. Life passes quickly, and what remains is eternity, and God’s presence on earth reminds us of that, points to that.
The eternal God present on earth only briefly—why? Because His abode is in heaven. And that’s where He invites us to join Him, to have our permanent dwelling.
So God becomes man truly, and that’s an amazing thing today on this day. We prepare, and the immediate preparation for tomorrow, Christmas Day—it’s an amazing reality of our faith. God becomes man, but not to permanently dwell here on earth, but to prepare us to permanently dwell with Him in heaven. Here we have no lasting city.
Christmas will begin; it’ll be awesome. It’s a beautiful season, but it will end soon, and very soon. Time will continue to go forward at its mad pace. Christmas will come, will end. 2026 will come, will end. All of time, whatever time we have left on earth, will soon be over.
But we have to live in the present moment. So this Christmas season that we have before us, let us make it one that will truly make an impact for all eternity, because that’s where Christmas and all of God’s presence on earth points to.
Praised be Jesus and Mary.