30 December 2025
Loving what lasts
For a faithful Jew in the days of Jesus,
life was ordered by longing.
You lived with promises that were older than you were.
You prayed for what you could not yet see.
You waited for God to act
not abstractly,
but concretely, in history,
in flesh and blood.
And you learned, slowly
and sometimes painfully,
that not everything that shines endures.
That tension lives quietly beneath today’s readings.
Saint John speaks with pastoral urgency when he tells the community,
“Do not love the world or the things of the world.”
Those words can sound harsh if we misunderstand them.
John is not rejecting creation.
He is not condemning joy, beauty, or celebration.
He is naming a danger that every generation faces:
the temptation to build a life that no longer needs God.
This temptation is why “first world” countries begin to lose their faith,
and why “third world” countries increase in faith,
seeming happy and jubilant with so much less.
The “world” John warns against is not the earth God made good. It is a way of living that puts desire, pride, and self-sufficiency at the center.
A life organized as if God were unnecessary.
It is why Jesus said that it is so hard for the rich to inherit eternal life.
And John is clear:
such a life cannot last.
What captivates us today fades tomorrow.
What promises fulfillment often leaves us restless and empty.
That warning lands especially close during Christmas.
This is a season filled with real goodness
—family, generosity, beauty, wonder.
But it is also easy to confuse joy with excess,
and fulfillment with accumulation.
We can celebrate Christmas
while slowly losing sight of what makes it Christmas at all.
John brings us back to what endures.
And the Gospel gives us a human face to that wisdom.
Anna is a woman shaped by waiting.
She has known loss.
She has lived long enough to see hopes delayed.
Yet she has not grown cynical or closed off.
She remains in the Temple,
praying, fasting, watching.
She lives with a heart trained to recognize God when He finally comes.
From a Jewish perspective,
this moment is extraordinary.
The Temple is the place of God’s dwelling.
And into that holy space
comes a poor couple with a child,
offering the sacrifice of the humble.
Nothing about the scene demands attention.
And yet Anna sees what others do not.
She recognizes that God has arrived
—not in power,
not in spectacle,
but in vulnerability.
This is where John’s warning and the Christmas mystery meet.
The Child born in Bethlehem does not simply forgive us and leave us unchanged.
He draws us into His divine life,
which causes a change in us.
Over time, our desires are meant to shift.
What once captivated us begins to loosen its grip.
What once seemed invisible
—faithfulness, mercy, hope—
begins to shine.
That is why, in the lives of so many saints,
the willingness to surrender great wealth
becomes a mark of their desire to follow God fully.
Anna’s life shows us what happens when someone refuses to organize their life around passing things.
She does not cling to what the world values.
She clings to the promise.
And when the promise appears,
she is ready.
She speaks. She gives thanks. She becomes a witness.
That is what the Incarnation is meant to do in us.
Not all at once.
Not dramatically.
But steadily. Quietly. Truthfully.
The world will keep offering us ways to feel complete without God. It will promise satisfaction, security, and control.
But John reminds us
—and Anna’s life confirms it—
that what is built without God
eventually passes away.
What remains is love rooted in God.
What remains is a heart open to His presence.
What remains is the quiet joy of recognizing Him when He draws near.
The Child who rests in Anna’s gaze
is the same Lord who is among us now
—often unnoticed, often unrecognized.
Christmas invites us to ask:
What am I loving?
What am I clinging to?
What is shaping my desires?
Because when Christ truly enters a life,
something begins to change.
What once mattered lessens.
What truly matters becomes clear.
And the Light that came into the world begins,
slowly but surely, to reorder the heart.