Two thousand years ago a pregnant teenager and her husband made their way to Bethlehem. Why? Because a dictator who thought he was God, Augustus Cæsar, said so, and his local puppet government and his occupying forces said so too. It was a violent, unequal world, where armies crossed to and fro, where little people were pushed from pillar to post by soldiers and bureaucrats and ended up homeless and poor, having their babies on the streets or in barns. Soon our young couple had to move on again, to flee into Egypt, this time because the soldiers were after them, or after their baby, at the directions of another tyrant-king named Herod, one who found even newborn babies a threat. And there are more characters in tonight's story: there are shepherds, who lived like swagmen or street kids in the fields. They were nobodies, their evidence inadmissible in court, their presence as unwelcome at inns as was Joseph and his pregnant bride.

Not a whole lot has changed in two thousand years. The streets of Bethlehem still often run with blood. The Middle East is still rent by rival power factions and their militias, a foreign empire with its friends and enemies, insurgents and terrorists and plenty of passion about religion and politics, but a shortage of live-and-let-live tolerance. Looking around the world today, there are still plenty of tin-pot dictators who think they are god and have weapons to prove it, plenty of terrified nobodies, voiceless people, oppressed women and dying babies.

So we might well ask: Christmas - all for what? With the benefit of two millennia of hindsight, did this birth really make any difference? Isn't the sometimes noble, sometimes shameful Christian experiment now history, a spent force in a post-Christian world? Hasn't it failed to make any real difference to the Middle East or to the rest of world? And if so, why on earth do we keep coming back, year after year? Is it just for the schmaltzy carols and the bright colours, to keep Mum and Dad or Grandmum happy, or to tick spiritual experience box at least once a year? Or is there more to it?

What is so alluring about this baby born tonight? What is so compelling about this claim that God is now and for ever one of us and with us; that the Creator of Universe is now also a creature of that universe; that 'unto us a Son is born', a God who has truly assumed our flesh, knows and loves us from inside, in all our humanity, our fragility, our immaturity, our pains, our failings? Perhaps it is this: that deep in every human heart we want more, we dream of more, not just more of the same, not just more presents and food, money and power, comfort and security: for much as we might accumulate these things and good as they are in right amounts, appropriately achieved and applied, yet still our hearts crave for more? Any half-sensitive soul yearns to transcend the limitations of our selves and our little worlds. Even in this most faithless of ages, people still hunger for some experience of that divine glory and earthly peace promised us tonight by angels.

"The people who walk in darkness will see a great light," Isaiah prophesied, "Those who live in deep shadow and despair, those oppressed by a heavy yoke, those with cloaks rolled in blood...: to such as these a child will be born. That's good news, the best of news, not for the divine Cæsar or his bloody princes and generals; they don't need a "Wonder-Counsellor, Mighty-God, Everlasting-Father, Prince-of-Peace". For them 'peace without end' is Rome's peace, imposed by blood and slavery. But for shepherds living rough in the fields, for the homeless and refugees, the pregnant teens and the slaughtered innocents, those yoked by drug addiction or depression, each one of us when we are living in any kind of darkness or difficulty: for us a baby is born this night!

This year our parish distributed a Christmas card to every home in our area with our prayers for all our neighbours and an invitation to join us this Christmas for Mass. On the front is a copy of the best loved and honoured Marian icon in Rome, that in the Major Basilica of St Mary. A newborn Jesus sits in the gentle embrace of his Mum and stares lovingly up at her, which tells us he is one of us, a child. In his left arm he holds a Gospel book, which tells us he is the Word of God incarnate. His right arm is slightly raised in blessing, which tells he is the Universal Priest. His Mother gazes out towards us, drawing us to centre on her divine Son.

Some of the ancients believed this image was brought to Rome by St Helena after her archaeological digs and installed in the Basilica by her son the Emperor Constantine. It was allegedly one of several painted of Our Lady from life by St Luke, but in this case it was painted upon Mary's own table built by the Redeemer in the workshop of St Joseph. At various times the people of Rome have prayed before it or even brought it out into streets to defend Rome against plague, hence its first title Salus Populi Romani, Health of the Roman People. To it was attributed a miraculous midsummer snow and so it also became known as Our Lady of Snows. It was much copied and became known in some places as the Mother Thrice Admirable and as the World Youth Day Icon.

That World Youth Day Icon is now making its way around Australia with the World Youth Day cross and it has already covered over 30,000 kilometres. Like the Olympic torch heralding the coming Games, the Cross and Icon are portents of an extraordinary grace promised to our country next year, When the Pope arrives in Sydney in just over 200 days time, there will be a quarter of a million young people aged 16-35 from around Australia and world waiting for him. They will already have spent three days in catechesis and concerts and culture, getting ready to celebrate the Holy Father's arrival on Sydney Harbour, the Stations of Cross enacted by young people throughout the city streets, the Pilgrim walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the Vigil and Final Mass at Randwick. By then the crowds will have swollen to half a million or more and will include younger and older people too. When we ask whether what happened tonight 2007 years ago really changed the course of history, really changed anything, we might consider that the biggest crowd ever to gather in one place for anything here in Australia, will gather next year not for a government-enforced census, not for a war or even the ritual war of sport, but for faith and hope and love for the Child we celebrate tonight.

Dare we dream that our world could change, that we could change? For centuries right back to the days of Cæsar Augustus, young men have stormed backwards and forwards across Europe and the Mid East with war on their minds and young women and babies have fled in prospect. Our icon tells us we can and should hope for something better from our young people. In this year of grace ahead for us in Australia, it will be the youth who tell us of "Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth" and that this is worth striving for, under grace. In this World Youth Day year ahead Christ's enduring place in our history will be told most eloquently by teenagers and young adults, just as it was by teen Mary and her husband at the first Christmas.

The life of that baby born to them, born to us that night was destined to be short. He was to die still a youth himself. Yet in his body the Church, he grows to maturity. The biography of God-made-man continues to be written, and the Christening of humanity, of time, of the cosmos continues. Tonight we celebrate not just a feast of 2,007 years past, but a future for us all and for our dear young people.

Bishop Anthony Fisher OP