GOLD, FRANKINCENSE, MYRRH
Epiphany. Mt.2:1-12
AIM: To show how Jesus’ roles as king, priest, and sacrifice, prefigured in the Magi’s gifts, are the model for our lives.
Who were these Magi? Where did they come from? We do not know. On the level of history, the story we have just heard is shrouded in mystery. When we move to the spiritual level, however, the mystery falls away. The gifts which the Magi offered tell us a great deal about Mary’s child. The Magi offered him:
gold for a king — incense for a priest — and myrrh for his burial.
Jesus was a king.
Yet Jesus was different from all other kings known to history. Asked by Pilate whether he was “King of the Jews,” Jesus was reluctant to claim the title (Jn. 18:33-8). Unlike all other kings, Jesus was never interested in amassing possessions and wealth. He had no palace, not even a fixed abode (cf. Lk 9:58). He never lorded it over people. Jesus was a shepherd-king who came, he said, “not to be served, but to serve” (Mk 10:45), even to the extent of laying down his life for his sheep (cf. Jn. 10:11). Yet —
Jesus was also a priest.
A priest is a man for others; someone set apart to offer God prayer, praise, and sacrifice on behalf of others. From antiquity the smoke of incense, curling heavenward, has symbolized this priestly activity. From a purely utilitarian point of view, judged by results, burning incense is a sheer waste. So is prayer, if we judge it by measurable, visible results. A skeptic, seeing a priest praying the Breviary, the Church’s daily offering of prayer and praise to God, asked: “How do you know anyone is listening?” Without faith, that question is unanswerable. You cannot prove that anyone is listening. With faith, however, no proof is necessary.
Jesus exercised his priesthood in those nights of solitary prayer which we read about in the gospels. He was no less a priest, however, when he healed the sick, consoled the sorrowing, and comforted people weighed down by suffering and sin. The supreme example of Jesus’ priesthood came, however —
On the cross —
where Jesus offered his heavenly Father not merely the prayer of his lips and his heart, but his very life. To anyone without faith the cross is a scandalous waste and utter defeat. For those with faith, however, the cross is the place of ultimate victory. The most eloquent symbol of this victory is the empty tomb of Easter morning, which shows that the power of death and evil has been broken. Because of the sacrifice offered on Calvary by Jesus, our shepherd-king and priest, evil cannot control or master us, unless we consent.
The Magi’s gifts foretold all this: gold for a king, incense for a priest, myrrh for his burial. Jesus shares these three functions with us. Paul says that Jesus is “the first-born of many brothers” (Rom 8:29). In baptism we became members of his family, his sisters, his brothers. We share with Jesus, our elder brother, the functions of king, priest, and sacrifice.
Like Christ, our shepherd-king, we too are called to serve others. That was Jesus’ explicit command to his disciples when, at the Last Supper, they argued about “who should be regarded as the greatest” (Lk 22:24-26). The noblest of the Pope’s many titles is “Servant of the servants of God.” Whenever popes have lived that title, and inspired others to similar lives of service, the Church has enjoyed spiritual health. Whenever popes and the Church have neglected the servant role, the Church has become weak, flabby, and sick — no matter how much wealth, privilege and power it may have amassed. We younger sisters brothers of Jesus share also in his priestly role. Like him, we are called to be people of prayer. Prayer is the soul’s breath and food. I was only a schoolboy when I discovered that when I neglected prayer, my grades suffered and my life began to fall apart. I’ve never forgotten that. As sharers of Christ’s priesthood, we are called to bring the love, healing, and power of God to others. We do so not by so much by words — for words are cheap, and our world is inundated by words — as by the force of our example. “Your light must shine before others,” Jesus says, “so that they may see goodness in your acts and give praise to your heavenly Father” (Mt. 5:16).
Finally, we are called to share in Jesus’ death. God asks us to die daily to the selfishness and self-centeredness that lurk within each of us. And one day God will ask us to give back to him the precious gift of life itself, so that he can raise us to enjoy with Jesus, our elder brother, new, eternal life with God: a life without suffering, without sorrow, without frustration and disappointment, without loneliness, and without sin.
The Magi offered Jesus gold, frankincense and myrrh: the best and most costly gifts they had. Somewhere in this church right now there is someone who is longing to do the same. And yet, when you look at your life, you seem to have so little to offer. When you look within, you see so many broken resolutions; good that you might have done and yet failed to do; evil that you could have avoided and did not. You wanted to give Jesus so much. What you have given him up to now is so little. You ask yourself: What can I give him?
Over a century ago the English poet, Christina Georgina Rosetti, asked that question. Her answer is beautiful:
What can I give him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a wise man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give him — give my heart.
AIM: To help the hearers see that salvation is a free gift, not a reward.
Few words strike such a sensitive nerve today as the term “liberation.” For the last half-century liberation from colonial rule has been the central concern of almost all Third World nations. In our country we have been through black liberation. We are still hearing about women’s liberation. And until recent years there was much talk about something called “liberation theology.”
Liberation is Paul’s theme in today’s second reading. The purpose of Jesus’ life, Paul writes, was “to ransom those born under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” If Paul were writing today, he would add, “and daughters.” Because of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, Paul says, “you are no longer a slave but a son.”
Christ has liberated us from what Paul called slavery to the law: the ten commandments plus the more than six hundred interpretations of them which the rabbis had developed in Paul’s day. Paul found this legal system enslaving because it seemed to lay down conditions which he must first fulfil before God would love him and bless him. And how could he — or anyone — ever be sure he had done enough? Speaking for himself, Paul said he knew he had not done enough: “The good I want to do I fail to do. But what I do is the wrong which is against my will” (Rom. 7:19). Which of us could not say the same?
The heart of the gospel, for Paul, is the good news that God’s love is not reserved for those who prove they deserve it by keeping all of God’s law. The idea that God only loves those who earn his love constituted “slavery” for Paul. Jesus had liberated us from this slavery, Paul taught, by making us his sisters and brothers, daughters and sons of his heavenly Father and ours. “You are no longer a slave but a son; and if a son, then also an heir, through God.” Sons and daughters do not have to earn their inheritance. It is theirs by right.
It is good to be reminded of this as we cross the threshold of a new year. The basis of our relationship with God is not what we do for him, but what God has already done for us — not as a reward for services rendered, but simply out of love. This reminder is especially important, because it cuts clean across the messages society constantly sends us.
Society today tells us that we get ahead by achievement. In school teachers classify us as achievers or non-achievers; later as under-achievers and over-achievers. Society’s highest rewards – wealth, power, and fame – go to super-achievers. The important thing in life, we are constantly told, is to achieve as much as we possibly can.
For many this unceasing drive for achievement is a modern form of the “slavery” that Paul writes about in our second reading. God alone knows how much tension, and how many breakdowns in physical and mental health, are caused by people feeling pressured to ever higher levels of achievement.
How fitting, therefore, that the Church places before us, as we begin a new year, the figure of a woman who is known not for what she achieved, but for what she received. “Mary kept all these things,” the gospel tells us, “reflecting on them in her heart.” None of the things she kept in her heart and reflected on were things she had done for God. They were all things God had done for her:
— The visit of the angel with his overwhelming news.
— The beautiful words of her cousin, Elizabeth: “The moment your greeting sounded in my ears, the baby stirred in my womb for joy.” (Lk 1:44)
— The visit of the shepherds recounting the angels’ message to them.
— And later the arrival of those mysterious “wise men from the east” with their remarkable tale of following a star. (Mt 2:2)
How much of that was Mary’s achievement? None of it! It was all God’s gift, sheer gift. Mary stands at the gate of the new year as the model of Christian discipleship, the one who was always totally open to God’s gifts, and to his action in her and through her.
Today’s feast gives us the best of all new year’s resolutions: to live as Mary did. Do not worry or fret about what you must do for God. Be open instead, as Mary was, to what God wants to do for you — and through you for others. Then whatever you do for God will be a response to him: your attempt to thank our loving heavenly Father who loves us with the tenderness and passion of a mother, and whose gifts to us always exceed by far all we can ever deserve or even desire.
As you cross the threshold of this new year, keep in your heart, as Mary did, all that God has done for you in your life up to this day: his unbelievable patience with you; his constant forgiveness of your sins; the preservation of your life amid so many dangers (some known to you, others known only to God). Reflect on all these things, as Mary did.
If you do that — even if you just try to do that — then the year that is just a few hours old right now will be what deep in our hearts, we all hope and pray it will be: a truly happy new year.
AIM: To show that Jesus, like us, learned to love in childhood by being loved; and
to encourage the hearers to share their love with others.
What do we know of Jesus’ childhood and youth? Virtually nothing. Matthew records the flight of the holy family into Egypt. Luke gives us the story of the infant Jesus’ presentation in the JerusalemTemple, which we have just heard in the gospel. And he tells us that at age twelve Jesus stayed behind in the Temple after Mary and Joseph had started home, thinking their son was in the group with them. Otherwise the record is blank. No wonder that the first three decades of Jesus’ life are called “the hidden years.”
The obscurity surrounding Jesus’ infancy and youth makes the concluding words of today’s gospel especially precious: “The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.” Jesus’ slow growth from infancy to manhood shows how completely he who was God’s Son entered into our human condition.
God could have sent his Son into the world fully mature, in a way so dramatic as to compel everyone’s attention. Instead Jesus made his entrance, like every one of us: quietly, inconspicuously. Like us, Jesus passed through the weakness and vulnerability of infancy; through childhood, adolescence, and early manhood. At each stage Jesus possessed the perfection proper to that age. He was the perfect baby, the perfect boy, the perfect adolescent, the perfect young man. There was, however, real growth: physical, mental, and also spiritual.
That growth took place in the context of a family: a family like any other, yet also unlike any other. Luke introduces them at the beginning of today’s gospel, yet they speak no word throughout. Their silence is another aspect of those “hidden years.”
Were those years really so hidden, however? Even if we have no record of them, it is not difficult to reconstruct from our knowledge of Jesus’ public ministry something of what they must have been like. The early nineteenth century German novelist Jean Paul Richter writes: “What a father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity.” Many of Jesus’ familiar sayings surely reflect the atmosphere of simple trust in God, and undivided loyalty to him, which surrounded Jesus from his birth. It is fanciful to imagine Jesus first hearing in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth such sayings as these?
“Do not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own.” (Mt 6:34)
“The one who endures to the end will be saved.” (Mt 24:13;10:22, Mk 13:13)
“The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” (Mt 19:30, 20:16, Mk 10:31, Lk 13:30)
Is it conceivable that any shoddy work came out of that carpenter’s shop? That its customers were kept waiting for things beyond the time they were promised?
Father Theodore Hesburgh, emeritus President of Notre Dame University and one of our country’s great priests, has said: “The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” Where did Jesus got his unsurpassed capacity to love even outcasts, lepers, beggars, and hardened criminals, if not from Joseph and Mary?
A film I saw years ago on natural childbirth showed more clearly than many words the effect of a mother’s love even in the first moments after birth. As the baby is placed for the first time in the mother’s arms, she cries out spontaneously: “O you beautiful baby! I love you already.” That is how each one of us learned to love: not from formal instruction or from books, but simply by being loved.
Parents don’t wait to love their children until the little ones have done something to deserve parental love. Indeed, before birth, and for months thereafter children are so burdensome, to their mothers especially, that there is every reason why they should not be loved. Parents love their children nonetheless. And if they are good parents, they don’t stop loving when their children disappoint them, changing from the little angels they admired in the crib into grown up sinners like Mom and Dad. It is this experience of unmerited and unconditional love that makes it possible for us, as we grow up, to love others in return. Jesus too learned to love in that way. He learned about God’s love from experiencing the human love of Mary and Joseph.
Do you see now why the Church gives us, on this first Sunday after Christmas, a feast in honor of the Holy Family? By recalling the atmosphere of love that surrounded Jesus from birth, and molded him in that long process of human growth referred to in the closing words of today’s gospel, we are reminded that this is the way each of us grew to maturity. This is how we learned to love, if we have learned at all. This is how we learned how much, and how unconditionally, God loves us.
Here is what one of the modern world’s great lovers, Mother Teresa, said about loving and being loved: “The greatest suffering today is being lonely, being unwanted, being unloved; just having no one, having forgotten what it is like to have the human touch, human love; what it is to be wanted, what it is to be loved; what it is to have your own people. The greatest diseases are not leprosy, tuberculosis, or cancer. A much greater disease is to be unwanted, to be unloved.”
On this Feast of the Holy Family, God is asking each one of us, whom he has already made members of his family in baptism, and whom he loves totally and unconditionally, to be his agents in loving the unloved, the unwanted, the unlovable. Here at his holy table Jesus Christ, God’s Son, fills us brim full with his love — so that we can go forth from here to share that love with other people: His brothers and sisters, and ours too.
AIM: To help the hearers make room for Jesus Christ.
We have less hard information about Jesus’ birth than most people suppose. We don’t even know the date: December 25th was not selected until the fourth century. Nor do we know exactly where Mary gave birth to her child, save that it was not in what then passed for an inn at Bethlehem.
The innkeeper was a busy man in those days. The roads were full of travelers, because of the Roman-imposed census, which required people to return to their native town to be placed on the tax rolls. There was much to do at the inn, and money to be made. According to the age-old law of supply and demand, guests were doubled up, and prices raised. When Mary and Joseph appeared at his door, the innkeeper saw at once that these humble travelers were not the kind of guests he was looking for. He might have said, “You can’t afford it.” Instead he told them, a bit more tactfully, “No room” — and slammed the door. The innkeeper never knew it. But with those two words, “No room,” he had missed out on the greatest opportunity life would ever offer him.
It would be unfair to portray the Bethlehem innkeeper as a bad person. His words to Mary and Joseph, “No room,” would be repeated often in the next three decades. For the world to which Jesus came had in truth no room for him, though it was his world. As we shall hear tomorrow, in our third Christmas gospel: “He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him” (Jn. 1:11).
The ancient world into which Jesus was born had in Rome a temple called the Pantheon, with room for a hundred gods. But for the Son of the one true God there was no room in Rome’s Pantheon. Nor was there room for him in his own country — until people finally found room for him: on a hill called Calvary.
Has the situation changed in two thousand years? Would there be room for Jesus Christ if he were to come to the world today? to St. Louis? A person would have to be bold indeed to be confident of an affirmative answer to that question. Down through the centuries, and still today, the innkeeper’s words resound: “No room, no room.” And doors are slammed at his approach.
Why is there no room for Jesus Christ? Because people are afraid — afraid that if they give him room, he will take too much room; that little by little this man will take over their lives, changing their interests, their priorities, their plans, until they are no longer recognizable.
Is this fear justified? It is. If we admit Jesus Christ, he will indeed change our lives, and us. He will take all the room there is. No wonder that people are afraid. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” we read in the letter to the Hebrews (10:31).
There is, however, something even more fearful. It is this: to try to shut out this guest. For unlike other travelers, Jesus will not go away. He will continue to knock on our door, no matter how often we tell him, “No room.” The hand with which he knocks bears the print of the nails which pierced him in the place where, finally, people did find room for him. His persistence, like his patience and his love, are more than super-human. They are divine. He is the personification of the love that will never let us go.
Today, in this hour, Jesus Christ is asking for room in your life. He asks one thing, and one thing alone: that you open the door.
Some verses of an old hymn, little known to Catholics, say it best.
O Jesus, you are standing, outside the fast-closed door,
In lowly patience waiting, to pass the threshold o’er.
Shame on us, Christian people, his name and sign who bear,
Shame, thrice shame upon us, to keep him standing there.
O Jesus, you are knocking, and lo, that hand is scarred,
And thorns your brow encircle, and tears your face have marred.
O love that passes knowledge, so patiently to wait.
O sin that has no equal, so fast to bar the gate!
O Jesus, you are pleading, in accents meek and low,
“I died for you, my children, and will you treat me so?”
O Lord, with shame and sorrow, we open now the door;
Dear Savior enter, enter, and leave us nevermore.
WHAT THE SHEPHERDS FOUND
Christmas, at Dawn. Titus 3:4-7; Lk 2:15-20.
AIM: To instil a sense of wonder and joy at the incarnation.
The world’s great religions, someone has said, are all about the same thing: our search for God. To this general statement there is an important exception. Christianity, and its parent, Judaism, are concerned not with our search for God, but with God’s search for us. At Christmas we celebrate God’s search, and his coming to us, in a special way. The readings at this Mass give us answers to three important questions about God’s coming. They tell us how God comes, when he comes, and why.
How does God come?
He comes in very ordinary and humble circumstances, to very ordinary and humble people. There was nothing dramatic about the birth of Mary’s child at Bethlehem. Few people took any notice — only a few outsiders, and three crackpot eccentrics.
Shepherds were outsiders in the ancient world. Without fixed abode, like gypsies today, they were mistrusted by respectable people. Since they frequently grazed their flocks on other people’s land, shepherds were considered too dishonest to be witnesses in court. Because their irregular lives made it impossible for them to observe the strict Sabbath and dietary laws, observant Jews held them in disdain.
The so-called Wise Men, whose visit we commemorate at Epiphany, were eccentrics: astrologers of some kind from God knows where, who set off on a madcap journey, following a star. We call them wise. To their contemporaries they were screwballs who were not playing with a full deck.
Nor was the scene which these visitors found at Bethlehem as attractive as we make it appear in our Christmas cribs. If Jesus were born today, it would probably be in a cardboard shack with a roof of corrugated iron in Africa, or somewhere in Latin America, without electricity or water: smelly, drafty, and cold.
How does God come? He comes in ordinary and humble surroundings, to people who live on the margin of society. That is how God came on the first Christmas. It is how he comes today.
When does God come?
He comes when we least expect him — when people have given up expecting him altogether. Matthew and Luke emphasize Jesus’ descent from the great King David, and Jesus’ birth “in David’s city” (Mt 1:17; Lk 1:27, 2: 4 & 11). They wanted to show that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, whose birth “of the house of David” the prophets had long foretold. Almost six centuries before Jesus’ birth, however, David’s royal house had come to an end. The revival of his long extinct dynasty after so great an interval was, humanly speaking, impossible. Moreover, the imperial census, which brought Joseph and Mary to David’s city, Bethlehem, was a humiliating reminder to their people that the nation over which David had once ruled as king was now governed by a foreign emperor across the sea. Rome, not Jerusalem, was the center of the world into which Jesus was born. At the very moment in which that world was set in motion by an imperial decree from its center, God was acting in an unimportant village on the edge of the empire in an obscure event from which we continue, twenty centuries later, to number our years.
Unthinkable? Impossible? Precisely! That is how God normally acts. He comes to us when we are least expecting him; when we have ceased expecting him at all. He comes in ways that stagger the imagination and demolish our conception of the possible. The creator of the universe comes as a tiny baby, born of a virgin.
Why does he do it? Why does God come at all?
To these questions our second reading gives us the answer: “When the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, [he saved us] not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy.”
God’s coming is not a reward for services rendered. He chose to come to us at the first Christmas for the same reason he comes to us today: not because we are good enough, but because he is so good, and so loving, that he wants to share his love with us, his unworthy, erring, and sinful children.
This explains too why he chose outsiders and eccentrics as the first witnesses of his coming. Before him we are all outsiders, all eccentrics. Before God we are all marginal, as the shepherds were, and the wise men. It is His love, and His alone, which draws us in from the darkness and cold of the margin to the light and warmth of the center.
It is because God gave us his love at the first Christmas that we give gifts to one another at this season. The love God gave us then, and continues to give us today, is neither distant, nor abstract. God’s love is a person who is very close to us. His name is Jesus Christ.
“THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH.”
Christmas Mass during the day. Heb. 1:1-6; Jn 1:1-18.
AIM: To explain the Incarnation and its significance for us.
It’s a strange gospel for Christmas, isn’t it? Where, we ask, are the shepherds, the manger, Mary and Joseph? Where is their child? Instead of these familiar Christmas figures we have heard about abstractions: light and darkness, the Word becoming flesh.
Let’s start with another word: “incarnation.” It means “taking on flesh, embodiment.” This building is the incarnation of an idea in the mind of the architect who designed it. It is the incarnation or embodiment too of the sacrifices that made its construction possible. Children are the incarnation of their parents’ love. And Jesus is the incarnation of God.
We cannot see God. Jesus shows us what God is like. That is why this Christmas gospel calls Jesus God’s Word. A word is used to communicate. Jesus is God’s word because he is God’s communication to us: not a lifeless, abstract statement, but God’s living and breathing utterance and self-disclosure.
When we listen to Jesus, we hear God speaking to us. When we look at Jesus, we see what God is like. What do we see when we look at Jesus? We see that he preferred simple, ordinary people. He came to the world in a provincial village where nothing interesting or important ever happened. Jesus moved not among wealthy or sophisticated people, or among scholars and intellectuals, but among ordinary people. They were the ones who welcomed him most warmly. The rich and powerful and learned had difficulties with Jesus. Many were hostile to him. That was true then. It remains true today.
Jesus was of the earth, earthy. In his youth he worked with his hands in the carpenter’s shop. His teaching was full of references to simple things: the birds of the air, the wind and the raging waves, the lilies of the field, the vine, the lost sheep, the woman searching for her one lost coin, leavening dough with yeast, the thief breaking in at night. Those were images that everyone could understand. Jesus taught also in parables: stories so simple that they capture the interest of children; yet so profound that learned scholars are still studying them today.
In preferring simple people and simple things, Jesus was showing us what God is like. He who is God’s utterance and word, God’s personal communication to us, is saying through all the circumstances of his life that God loves humble people. God is especially close to those who feel that they are not in control of their lives; that they are the victims of circumstances; that their lives are a tangle of loose ends and broken resolutions. In his earthiness Jesus shows us God’s love for this world and everything in it. Often we think of God and religion as concerned only with some higher, spiritual realm. That is wrong! God loves the earth and the things of earth. He must love them, because he made them. And God does not make anything that is not lovable. As John, the writer of today’s gospel, tells us in a later chapter: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16).
It is because God gave us his Son at Christmas that we give gifts to one another. The greatest gift we can give cannot be bought in any store. You cannot order it from an 800-number or over the Internet. You cannot wrap it. You cannot send it through the mail, by UPS or Federal Express. It is the gift God gave us at Christmas: the gift of himself. Even as a baby Jesus is God’s personal word and communication to us. In the words of our second reading, he is “the refulgence [that means the shining forth] of [God’s] glory, the very imprint of his being.”
Look at Mary’s child: helpless, vulnerable, and weak, as all babies are. He is God’s way of saying: ‘This is how much the Lord God, creator of heaven and earth, loves you; enough to be become tiny, insignificant, vulnerable.’ Jesus, the personal utterance and word of God, is God’s gift to you. He wants you to share this gift with others. You do so when, like God himself, you give yourself to others: when, like Jesus, you too love the company of ordinary people; when, like him, you remain close to the earth and the things of earth.
In a few moments we shall be offered our greatest and most important Christmas gift: the body and blood of our Lord, of Jesus who is God’s personal word to each one of us. The consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist are Christ’s body and blood: all his power, all his goodness, all his love. He offers all this to us:
— not as a reward for services rendered;
— not because we are good enough (for none of us is);
— but because he is so good that he wants to share his power, his goodness, and his love with us.
Jesus gives us this greatest of all gifts under one strict condition: that what we here receive, we generously share with others.
A St. Louis reader has posted a new review of No Ordinary Foolon the Amazon website. Hold down “Control” and double click on the underlined words in blue to read it.
“Unhappy the land that has no heroes,” the German playwright Bertolt Brecht writes in one of his plays. Heroes encourage us. They convince us that life is worth living. Our Catholic heroes are the saints. They do more than encourage us. They also pray for us.
One of the greatest heroes of Jesus’ people was the man we meet in our first reading today: King David. His career was as romantic as that of any film star or athlete today. From a lowly shepherd boy, the youngest in his large family, David rose to be king of God’s chosen people. On the way David had many setbacks, hard struggles against determined enemies, and at least one fall into serious sin.
Our first reading told of David’s desire to build a temple worthy of God. The prophet Nathan approves of David’s proposal — until Nathan learns that God has other plans. David would not build a house for God. God would build a house for him — not a structure of wood and stone, but a family, a dynasty. “Your house … shall endure forever,” God tells David. After David’s death, however, God’s plan seemed to collapse. The nation over which David had ruled was carried off into exile. The royal “house” which God has established for David seemed to have come to an end.
In the second reading, however, Paul says that God has kept his promise to David. Jesus is the fulfilment of that promise. He is the “missing link” who supplies the explanation of what had been hidden until his coming. Jesus, Paul says, is “the revelation of the mystery kept secret for long ages, but now manifested … according to the command of the eternal God and made known to all the nations.” On this fourth Sunday in Advent, however, it is not Jesus whom the Church places before us in the gospel, but his mother. How much Catholics used to hear about Mary. How little we hear about her today. Yet Mary has a message of special importance for us today: the message of faith.
What is faith? For many Catholics the word probably means those truths which we profess when we recite the Creed. Those articles of belief are the faith. Faith has another meaning, however: a personal meaning. Faith is not merely mental acceptance of truths. Faith is also personal trust. The Creed itself indicates this in its opening words. Not, “We believe that …” but, “We believe in …” The one we believe in, whom we trust, is God.
We learn the meaning of the truths of faith from catechisms and similar works. We learn faith in the sense of personal trust not from books but from people. The greatest model of this trusting faith is the woman the Church places before us in today’s gospel: Mary, the trusting and faith-filled mother of the Lord.
The kind of trusting faith we see in Mary reckons with the possibility that even our best and holiest ideas of God may be inadequate; that they must be broken and rebuilt anew. Mary models a faith that is prepared for darkness and trial, yet is always open to God. Hers is a faith that threw her totally upon God, permitting him to do with her and her life whatever he would.
Yet Mary’s faith was very modern. It was not a blind faith. Mary doubted and questioned. “How can this be?” Mary asked the angel who told her she was to be the mother of God’s Son. What Mary questioned, however, was not so much God, as her own ability to understand God and his plan for her life. Even in the midst of perplexity, however, Mary confessed that God knew best, even if she could not understand what he was about: “May it be done to me according to your word,” she told the angel.
That assent to God’s plan for her was not a one-time thing. It had to be constantly renewed, through many sufferings. The first was the humiliation of being an unmarried mother in a little village where everybody knew everyone else’s business, and gossip was rife. Later Simeon told Mary that her Son would be “a sign which men reject,” and that Mary herself would be “pierced with a sword” (Lk 2:35). The only story we have of Jesus’ childhood tells of his parents’ grief at his supposed loss, when their twelve-year-old Son stayed behind in Jerusalem without informing them.
Upon reaching manhood, Jesus left his mother, as he demanded that his followers should leave their parents. He said that his true mother and other relatives were not those related by blood, but those who did his will (Lk 8:21). Sometimes, as at the wedding in Cana, Jesus seemed to treat his mother roughly. Yet even then she persevered in faith, telling the servants to “do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2:5). At Jesus’ farewell meal with his closest friends there was, apparently, no place for his mother — though there was a place for her the next day: at Calvary. There, at the cross, Simeon’s prophecy, that a sword would pierce Mary’s heart, was fulfilled. Yet Mary went on trusting even when — as long ago — she “did not understand” (Lk 2:50).
Can there be any doubt that it is precisely this trusting faith of Mary’s which we need today? Today, more than ever, we need the kind of faith which Mary had, the faith she models for us: faith which continues to trust in God even amid things we do not understand and cannot explain.
Faith in this sense is not something we can summon up by willpower. Faith, the Catechism tells us, “is a supernatural gift from God” (No. 179). And who can doubt that this faith will be given to us in the measure in which we invoke the prayer of the woman who herself modeled this faith, whom Jesus gave as mother to his best friend — and so to all his friends — as he died on the cross? (Cf. Jn. 19:27) And so I invite you to supply the conclusion to the homily, by responding to the age-old prayer based on the angel’s words to Mary in today’s gospel:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.
L Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
The professor of homiletics at one of the country’s leading Protestant seminaries wrote me last week:
“I have just read the first three chapters of your book, No Ordinary Fool: A Testimony to Grace. I couldn’t put it down. I found myself weeping as I read of the death of your mother. You have recreated a world which has indeed passed away, but which is a joy to experience through your historical imagination. And, in the process you testify to another world which is coming to meet us in Jesus Christ and in the company of all the saints.”
Third Sunday in Advent, Year B . Is. 61:1-2a,10-11; Thes.5:16-24; John 1:6-8,19-28.
AIM: To help the hearers experience Christian joy.
One of the abiding beauties of childhood is the ability of little children to rejoice at the coming of Christmas. Many people here know a young child who is already in a fever of excitement, which increases each time a package is brought into the house to be put away until the great day. Through children we relive some of the joy we once felt at their age at the coming of Christmas.
Joy is the theme of the liturgy on this third Advent Sunday. The first reading and the gospel both contain the joyful proclamation that the long-promised servant of the Lord is at hand, the Messiah. And the second reading tells us to “Rejoice always.”
Is that realistic? Can we rejoice always? Certainly not in the sense of making life one long happy-happy celebration. Every life contains sadness and hurt. Somewhere in this church right now someone is asking: “What reason do I have for joy?” If that is your question, then let me speak very personally to you. No matter what hurt you bring here — loneliness, perhaps, disappointment, bereavement, or the pain of some bitter injustice — you have, along with the pain and hurt, every reason for joy. Let me tell you about three. Each is closely connected with Jesus Christ. We can rejoice because:
— Jesus is behind us;
— Jesus is with us; and —
— Jesus is ahead of us.
Jesus is behind us
At the first Christmas Jesus entered into our human life. He shared everything life brings us, sin excepted. Jesus experienced life’s joys: think of the wedding feast at Cana, where the quantity of water he turned into wine would have kept the party going for a week! But Jesus also tasted bitter grief. The shortest verse in the Bible says that at the grave of his dear friend Lazarus “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). On the cross Jesus experienced the most bitter injustice, and excruciating pain. The babe in the crib at Bethlehem, and the man on the cross at Calvary, both proclaim: God cares. God loves you. Life is not meaningless, provided it is lived for Him, and in the strength that He alone can give. Sensing this in advance, Mary uttered those beautiful words we repeated in today’s Responsorial Psalm: “My soul rejoices in my God.” Despite suffering, injustice, and pain, we rejoice because Jesus shared it all. Jesus is behind us. We have, however, a further reason to rejoice: the knowledge that —
Jesus is with us.
He is never distant, even when we stray far from him. To be with Jesus, all that is necessary is a simple upward movement of the heart. “Pray without ceasing,” our second reading told us. Is that any more realistic than the command to rejoice always? If we think that praying means reciting long prayers, it is not reasonable. Once we realize, however, that short prayers are best, then praying always is realistic. How often, as we go through the day, do we have reason to say: “Jesus, help me.” Whenever I realize, as I do often, how blessed I am to be a priest, and how much more the Lord gives me every day than I could ever deserve, I say over and over: “Lord, you’re so good to me, and I’m so grateful.”
“My Lord and my God” is a perfect prayer. So are the holy names, spoken as we cross the street, drive through traffic, or stand in the checkout lane: “Jesus, Mary, Joseph.” Or simply the name of Jesus alone, repeated with every breath, with every heartbeat: “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” That is a perfect prayer, which goes straight to our heavenly Father, reminding us at every moment that he is with us.
Jesus is with us in his holy word: proclaimed here in the assembly of God’s people, or read over quietly by ourselves. More than one person here has experienced, through hearing or reading Holy Scripture, what those two friends of Jesus experienced on that first Easter evening on the road to Emmaus: “Did not our hearts burn within us as he … explained the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).
Jesus is with us in the sacraments, especially in the sacrament we are celebrating right now: the Holy Eucharist. Jesus is with us also (though we often forget this) whenever we encounter someone in any kind of need. One day we shall hear him saying to us: “Inasmuch as you did it — or failed to do it — to one of these least sisters or brothers of mine, you did it — or failed to do it — to me” (Matthew 25: 40 & 45).
So we rejoice because Jesus has entered into our human life, experiencing the same joys and sorrows we experience. We rejoice also because Jesus is always with us. And our final reason for joy in the knowledge that —
Jesus is ahead of us.
The one future event that is absolutely certain is death. If death were simply the snuffing out of a candle, we should have little reason for joy. But death is infinitely more. Death is the great transformation, the passage from this life, limited in a hundred ways and shadowed by suffering, to life eternal: where there will be no limitations, no suffering; where God will wipe away all tears from our eyes. The certainty of death, and the parting from loved ones which death entails, sadden us. We can rejoice, however, in the knowledge that when we come to walk that last stretch of life’s way, we shall not be alone. Jesus will be with us. He is waiting for us at the end of life’s road, to welcome us with joy to the eternal dwelling place that he has gone ahead to prepare for each one of us (cf. John 14:2).
What reason do we have for joy? Every reason! We rejoice to know that Jesus is behind us: he has entered into human life and shared it to the full. We rejoice because Jesus is always with us: never distant, even when we stray far from him. And we rejoice because Jesus is ahead of us: every day, every hour, every tick of the clock brings us closer to the great encounter with Him who loves us beyond our imagining.
And so now I, his unworthy but joyful servant, invite you, once again, to join in the great feast in which we celebrate this joy; where we encounter, as intimately as we can in this life the One whom I now proclaim to you with great joy:
“Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, yes and forever” (Heb. 13:8).
Second Sunday in Advent, Year B. Is. 40: 1-5, 9-11; Mark 1:1-8.
AIM: To help the hearers repent, and to show the Spirit’s role in repentance.
“John was clothed in camel’s hair … He fed on locusts and wild honey.”
Not exactly the kind of character we’d care to meet socially — let alone invite into our homes. Today we’d call someone like that a drop-out, a hippie perhaps; certainly a food nut. Can someone so bizarre really have anything to say to us at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Let’s look at what John did say. His message has two parts. John proclaimed:
— “A baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins;” and —
— the coming of one mightier than himself, who would baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit.
In placing this message before us on this second Advent Sunday, the Church is saying that it is relevant — and important. Let’s see why.
Repentance means “turning around,” reversing the direction of our lives. We come into this world turned in on ourselves. In infancy and early childhood, what I want, right now, is more important than anything else. Some of you will surely remember celebrated baby doctor of an early generation, Dr. Spock. Like some of you, perhaps, I was raised on Dr. Spock’s principles. That may explain why I’ve turned out so badly. In one of his books Spock tells about a two-year old who was a little angel, until he was put down to sleep. Then he screamed his lungs out. Up to a certain age, we can’t do anything about this self-centeredness. It is inborn. We can’t even hide it. It is there for the whole world to see.
Part of growing up is learning to overcome our self-centeredness. To do that we must admit that is there: that I am not the person I ought to be and want to be; that I fall short of what God wanted me to be when, through my parents, he gave me the precious gift of life.
The people who came to John to be baptized in the Jordan river were making that fundamental admission: “They acknowledged their sins,” Mark’s gospel tells us. That meant — as acknowledgment of sin must always mean — facing up to their brokenness; admitting that their lives were a tangle of loose ends and failed resolutions. That is the first step in repentance: admitting that we fall short, that our lives are disordered.
Many people get that far. But then they think that is up to them to mend their brokenness. By trying harder they think they can clean up their act, get it all together, as we sometimes say today. The second part of John’s message demolishes such optimistic ideas about repairing our disordered lives through our own willpower. “One mightier than I is coming after me,” John said. “I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Acknowledging our sins, admitting our self-centeredness, is only the first step, John is saying. We need to acknowledge something more: that the disorder in our lives can be put right only by a power greater than our own; a power from outside ourselves. This is the power of God’s Holy Spirit.
Are you completely satisfied with your life? If you knew that you were to stand before the Lord in judgment tonight, is there nothing you would regret, nothing that you would want changed? If there really is nothing, then the gospel of Jesus Christ is not for you. For this gospel is good news: the almost unbelievably good news that God loves people who are not satisfied with their lives; who — when they remember that they must stand before the Lord in judgment one day — are weighed down by all the things they wish they had done differently. Only for such people does John’s Advent message of repentance make any sense at all.
And for such people — for all of us who are not completely satisfied with our lives, the second half of John’s message – about a power greater than our own – is as important as the first part: the call to repentance. The changes that need to take place in our lives will not occur without our best effort — true. But our best effort alone is insufficient. Thinking that we must first get our act together before God will love us and bless us leads either to pride, or to despair. Either we persuade ourselves that we have got our act together, and now it is time for God to reward us for our efforts — which is pride. Or we grow so discouraged at constantly falling short that we fall into despair.
The gospel message, Christ’s good news of God’s freely given love, is for those who know that they don’t have their act together; who have tried and tried again to get it together, and failed time after time; but who recognize that there is One and One alone who can do for them what they never do for themselves: make straight in the wasteland of their lives a highway for Himself.
To accomplish this, Christ has given us a special sacrament: the sacrament of reconciliation or penance. Here is what the Catechism says about this sacrament: “Christ is at work in each of the sacraments. He personally addresses every sinner: ‘My son, your sins are forgiven.’ He is the physician tending each one of the sick who need him to cure them. He raises them up and reintegrates them into fraternal communion. Personal confession is thus the form most expressive of reconciliation with God and with the Church.” (1484)
I finished my Christmas shopping this week and got my gifts in the mail. There is still one more thing I need to do, however. I must go to confession. I hope you will too. If you recognize the need for the healing, purifying touch of God’s Holy Spirit; if you are able to admit that your own efforts alone will always be doomed to failure until you allow God to be at the center of your life — then, like me, you will want to receive this beautiful sacrament. Then, and only then, will your preparation for Christmas be complete. Then you will really be ready for the coming at Christmas of God’s Son: your savior, you redeemer; but also your brother, your lover, and your best friend.
The following is a brief Advent article, requested by the St. Louis Review:
SOMETHING BIG IS COMING
My four-year-old friend Doris,whocalls me “Grandpa Jay,” knows that something big is coming. She started singing “We wish you a merry Christmas” the second week in November. She was early – but right. Advent, a word which means “coming,” celebratesnot just one big coming, but three: the coming of Christ at Bethlehem; Christ’s final coming at the end of time; and between these two, his intermediate coming here and how.
None of these three is the result of anything we do. They are the result of what God does. At Bethlehem God intervened not only in history, but also in biology. His son Jesus came not by the God-given gift of procreation, from within humanity. He came from outside humanity. He took his human nature from his mother. But he had God for his Father.
Similarly, Christ’s final coming at the end of time will not come through human effort. It will be God’s final intervention from without, as surely as Christ’s birth at Bethlehem was God’s intervention from without.
Between these two comings of Christ, however, there is an intermediate coming, here and now. Christ’s first coming at Bethlehem was inconspicuous. The only people who showed up to celebrate were some shepherds and three crackpot astrologers from God knows where. His intermediate coming is similarly inconspicuous. Most of the time we cannot feel it. Yet like Christ’s final coming at the end of time it is a coming in power, for it is the presence within us of God’s Holy Spirit. Jesus spoke of this intermediate coming when he said: “Anyone who loves me will be true to my word, and my Father will love him; we will come to him and make our dwelling with him” (Jn 14:23).
Doris is too young to know it. But she has three reasons to be excited. In obscurity and weakness God came to us at Bethlehem; in power and great glory he will come at the end of time. Inconspicuously, quietly, but with great power he wants to come right now – to you!
Fr. John Jay Hughes is the author, most recently, of No Ordinary Fool: A Testimony to Grace (Tate Publishing). The son and grandson of Anglican priests, he was a priest in the Episcopal Church himself for six years. He describes his difficult journey to the Catholic Church, and writes with passion about his joy in priesthood, “all I ever wanted from age twelve.”
