Welcome to Bloom’s Christmas Eve Mass, the Vigil of the Nativity of Our Lord. Tonight the whole Church leans toward one birth, and the Gospel it hands us this morning is not the stable and not the shepherds. It is a man alone with a decision, and the single adjective Matthew gives him: being a just man. That phrase is where we are staying today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This Mass is offered in the Independent Catholic tradition, from the 1962 Roman Rite, and Bloom is not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. We say that plainly, the way Old Catholic and Anglo-Catholic communities have said it for more than a century, because you are entitled to know whose table you are sitting at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wherever you are this morning, you are welcome here. If you have arrived carrying something you have not told anyone, and you are bracing for the day it comes out, sit down. Today’s Gospel is about a man who learned something he did not expect and chose, before anyone advised him, not to make a spectacle of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The vestments are violet, because this is still the eve and not the feast. Christmas Eve is one of only seven vigils the Church kept when she cleared most of them away in 1955, and it keeps Advent’s colour until night falls. In French the whole feast has one word, Noel, and this is the vigil of it. On this day the Church has for centuries read aloud, in her own morning office, her reckoning of the years: so many from the creation of the world, so many from the flood, so many from the birth of Abraham, from Moses and the going out of Israel, from the anointing of David, down to a birth in Bethlehem of Juda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reckoning does not hurry. It walks the whole length of the story before it says the name, and that is the pace of this morning too. We are on the last step before the feast, and the Gospel gives us a man who has not yet been told.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(The Confiteor and Kyrie are said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We begin the way the Church has always begun, not with achievement but with an honest accounting. There is something clarifying about a liturgy that opens by admitting failure out loud, in company, before a word has been said about grace. It settles the question of who is entitled to be here before anyone can raise it, because everyone in the room says the same sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Gloria is not said at the Vigil Mass. It returns tonight, at midnight.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hold the silence where the hymn would go. The Church withholds the Gloria on purpose this morning, not because the joy is in doubt but because it is not yet. A vigil is a room set for a guest who has not walked in, and the withheld hymn is the Church declining to pretend the hour has come before it has.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Exod 16:6-7; Ps 23:1.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This day you shall know that the Lord will come, and save us: and in the morning you shall see His glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Lord’s are the earth and its fullness; the world and those who dwell in it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. The antiphon is repeated.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The antiphon is the Missal’s Hodie scietis<\/em>, drawn from the book of Exodus<\/a>, where Moses tells a hungry people in a desert that the proof will come in the morning. It is a promise made in the evening and kept at dawn. On Monday<\/a> we said the help in these Advent prayers arrives before the room has done anything to deserve it, and this antiphon has the same order: the knowing comes tonight, the seeing tomorrow, and neither is earned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O God, Who dost gladden us year after year with the expectation of our redemption: grant that we, who now welcome with joy Thine only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, may also gaze upon Him without fear when He cometh as our Judge, our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The prayer holds two comings in one sentence, the Redeemer welcomed with joy and the Judge to be met without fear, and it asks that the same people be present at both. That is a heavy thing to ask on a morning when yesterday<\/a> we were still praying for a strength the room does not have. Keep the word Judge<\/em> in your ear, because the Gospel is about to show us a man who declined to act as one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Romans 1:1-6<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, which he had promised before, by his prophets, in the holy scriptures, concerning his Son, who was made to him of the seed of David, according to the flesh,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who was predestinated the Son of God in power, according to the spirit of sanctification, by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead; by whom we have received grace and apostleship for obedience to the faith, in all nations, for his name; among whom are you also the called of Jesus Christ our Lord.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Exod 16:6-7; Ps 79:2-3.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This day you shall know that the Lord will come and save us: and in the morning you shall see His glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O Shepherd of Israel, hearken, O Guide of the flock of Joseph! From Thy throne upon the Cherubim, shine forth before Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasse.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The verse is from Psalm 79<\/a>, and it asks a shepherd to lead a flock named for Joseph, on a morning whose Gospel belongs to a man of that name. There is no Alleluia at the Vigil; the Gradual stands alone and the Gospel follows it directly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matthew 1:18-21<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child, of the Holy Ghost. Whereupon Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing publicly to expose her, was minded to put her away privately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But while he thought on these things, behold the angel of the Lord appeared to him in his sleep, saying: Joseph, son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is conceived in her, is of the Holy Ghost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And she shall bring forth a son: and thou shalt call his name JESUS. For he shall save his people from their sins.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (The Creed is not said at the Vigil Mass on a weekday. It is said tonight, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Church holds back the Creed this morning as she holds back the Gloria, and for the same reason. What we are about to confess at midnight is a birth that has not, in the liturgy’s own reckoning, happened yet. The faith is not in doubt. The hour is simply not here, and the Church is honest about hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matthew is spare here. He gives Joseph no speech, no background, no interior life beyond one clause. He gives him a single adjective and a single decision, and the adjective is just<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read the sentence again. Whereupon Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing publicly to expose her, was minded to put her away privately.<\/em> The grammar is doing something exact. Matthew does not say Joseph was a just man and, separately, decided to be kind. He says that being a just man is the reason for what follows, and what follows is a refusal to expose her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider how strange that is against the ordinary use of the word. In most mouths, a just man is the one who sees to it that a wrong is named and answered. Justice, as we usually mean it, is the thing that brings a matter into the open. Matthew uses the word for the opposite motion: being a just man, in this Gospel, is what keeps a matter out of the open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is not a loose use of the word, because the sentence will not allow it to be loose. The clause being a just man<\/em> is given as the cause, and not willing publicly to expose her<\/em> is given as what it caused. The man’s justice consisted in what he declined to do to her. Being a just man was not the credential Joseph carried into the decision. It was the decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hold that, because everything else this morning depends on it. When the Gospel of Christmas Eve wants to show us a just man, it does not show us a verdict delivered. It shows us a verdict withheld.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now look at the order of events, because the order is the whole of the argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Joseph learns that Mary is with child. He does not know how. Matthew tells us it is of the Holy Ghost, but Matthew tells us<\/em>; nobody has told Joseph. He is standing where any of us would stand, holding a fact that admits one ordinary explanation, and the ordinary explanation is a public disgrace waiting to happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And he decides. Being a just man, and not willing publicly to expose her, was minded to put her away privately.<\/em> The decision is finished before the next sentence begins. Only then, while he thought on these things<\/em>, does the angel come, and the angel comes in his sleep, when there is nothing left for Joseph to do about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The angel does not persuade Joseph to be kind. Joseph was already kind. The angel does not talk him down from a public denunciation. There was never going to be one. What the angel adds is information Joseph did not have and could not have had, and it comes to a man who had already, on his own, chosen the gentlest available path with the information he did have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is an old, plain definition of character that I have carried for a long time: character is when you make good moral decisions, doing the right thing, and letting your heart guide you, even when nobody is watching. Joseph in this Gospel is that sentence with a name on it. Nobody was watching. No angel had come. He decided anyway, and being a just man is the name Matthew gives to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Listen to the angel’s first two words, too. Fear not.<\/em> You do not tell a man not to be afraid unless he is, and the angel’s opening tells us the state Joseph decided in. He was frightened, he had a fact he could not explain, and being a just man was what he managed while frightened. Courage is not the absence of that fear; it is the decision made inside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So when the Gospel says being a just man, it is not describing a man who was told what to do and did it. It is describing what a man did before he was told anything. The revelation arrives second. The justice was already there, and so was the fear it had to be carried through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to be exact about what Joseph declined, because the whole Church has spent a long time being inexact about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He could have made it public. He could have brought the matter before the town and let the town do what towns do. Matthew says he was not willing publicly to expose her<\/em>, and the word is specific. Not unwilling to end the betrothal. Unwilling to make her a spectacle in ending it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the refusal, and it is a refusal of something that has been called righteousness in most times and places, including ours. Exposing her would have been the respectable course. It would have protected his own name and shown everyone he was not complicit. Being a just man, in most mouths then and now, would have meant doing exactly the thing Matthew says his justice forbade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mark the last word of the sentence as well: privately<\/em>. Matthew did not need it. Was minded to put her away<\/em> would have carried the plot on its own, and the writer added the adverb anyway, because the adverb is the point. Being a just man is not only the decision Joseph reached but the room he reached it in, and the room had nobody else in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put the fruit test to both paths, the way this ministry tests everything. Ask what the public course grows. It grows a woman disgraced in front of everyone she knows, a household broken loudly, a town that has learned once more that a private trouble is public property. Ask what Joseph’s course grows, and the answer is a quiet ending that leaves her standing. One of those is the fruit of being a just man and the other is the fruit of a man protecting his reputation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Sunday<\/a> Paul told the Corinthians to judge not before the time, because the Lord will bring to light the hidden things. Joseph is that instruction lived before it was written. He had a fact and not the whole of it, and rather than pass sentence on the part he had, he chose the course that could be undone if he was wrong. Being a just man meant leaving room to be wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was wrong, as it turned out, and gloriously. The angel corrected him. But notice that his wrong reading of the facts did no harm to anyone, because being a just man had already ruled out the only harmful response. A man who has decided not to expose anyone can be mistaken in safety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the naming, because Matthew’s own sentence asks for it and walking around it would be a failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not willing publicly to expose her.<\/em> Read that clause and think about who, in the actual life of the Church, has been publicly exposed in the name of holiness for exactly the situation Mary was in. Women who were pregnant and not married. Girls sent away from their own parishes. Women made to stand in front of a congregation and name a sin so the congregation could feel it had dealt with it. Mothers whose children were told for the rest of their lives what they were the evidence of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The teaching under all of that is that holiness requires exposure: that a wrong is not properly answered until it has been made public, and that a community’s purity depends on everyone seeing the fault named. It has been preached as justice for a very long time. Matthew’s Gospel says the opposite in a single clause. The just man is the one who would not do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to say what the harm is, exactly, because it hides inside a word this Gospel uses. The harm is not that a community has standards. The harm is that it mistakes exposure for righteousness, and calls the man who protects a woman’s name soft while calling the man who ruins it just. Christmas Eve reverses the labels. Being a just man is the protecting, not the ruining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apply the fruit test to Christianity’s own record here, as this ministry does, naming no other faith. What grew from the exposure teaching was not holier congregations. It was women who never came back, children raised inside a shame they had not earned, and a Church fluent in the language of purity and incapable of the thing Joseph did. That is not the fruit of the sentence Matthew wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Set this beside the Annunciation we read a week ago<\/a>, when the angel came to Mary in daylight and she answered aloud. Joseph gets the angel in his sleep, after his decision, and says nothing at all in this passage. Her yes is spoken. His is silent and prior. The Gospel needs both, and it calls the silent one being a just man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a second door, and it opens onto the present. A parish that has learned this Gospel stops asking how a person’s trouble got to be known and starts asking who has been told. It measures its holiness not by how thoroughly a fault was aired but by how few people needed to hear it for the matter to be put right. Being a just man, as an institution’s habit, is a smaller circle of people who know, not a larger one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One door to close before it swings the wrong way. Refusing to expose someone is not the same as covering for harm done to someone else. Joseph was protecting a woman who had wronged no one, from a town that would have punished her for it. Being a just man never means hiding what one person did to another; it means declining to make a spectacle of a person who has hurt nobody. The Church has confused those two for centuries, in both directions, and Matthew’s sentence keeps them apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which brings the whole thing down to the size it actually lives at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of a woman who kept the accounts for a small parish for thirty-one years, in a back office with a sash window and a filing cabinet that did not shut properly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was the kind of parishioner every church has one of and does not notice until she is gone. She had been confirmed in that building, married in it, and had buried a husband from it, and she had never once been asked to speak from the front. Her whole contribution was the ledger, done by hand, on a Tuesday morning, with a cup of tea she always let go cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One December she found a hole in the accounts. Not a large one, but a real one, and it traced in about twenty minutes to a young man who had taken over the Sunday collection count that autumn and had been entering the totals in the wrong column for eleven weeks running. Nothing was missing. Everything was simply in the wrong place, and it would have looked, to anyone who did not know how to read the book, exactly like theft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She had a choice, and it was the one in this morning’s Gospel. The parish council met that Thursday. The young man would be there. She could bring the ledger and lay it open and let the room do what rooms do, and she would have been called diligent for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She did not. She corrected the eleven entries in pencil, initialled each one, and on the Wednesday morning she caught the young man in the car park and showed him, standing by his car, where the columns went. That was the whole of it. Nobody else ever knew there had been a hole, and he has said since that he had already noticed something was wrong and had been sick with fear for a fortnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He does the accounts now. She trained him for two years before she stopped, and the pencil corrections are still in the book if you know which December to look in. Being a just man, in a parish office, on a Wednesday, is eleven lines put right and a conversation by a car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not going to tell you this fixed anything larger. The council never knew what it had been spared. She was never thanked for it, because thanking her would have required telling the story, and the story was the thing she had decided not to tell. Nothing in it is tidy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What it shows is only which of the two courses was reversible, and it was the one that kept the book closed. If she had been wrong about the young man, a pencil correction could be rubbed out and a conversation in a car park could be followed by another one. A ledger laid open in front of the council could not be taken back. Being a just man is the course you can undo if you turn out to be wrong, and it is the one Joseph took.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Gloria<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Creed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
One adjective, and one decision<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Being a just man, before the angel<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What the just man refused to do<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Exposed in the name of holiness<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The ledger and the pencil<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Offertory<\/h2>\n\n\n\n