“If you wish, you can make me clean.” This ought to be the prayer of all of us, I think. Does God wish to make us clean? Of course. But do we acknowledge his ability to do so? Sometimes we are so saddened by our sins that we feel we are beyond redemption. Our brokenness stares us in the face time and time again and accuses us of being unworthy of the attention of God. But the fact remains: If God wishes, he certainly can make us clean. All we have to do is let him, to believe in his power to do it, and rejoice in his desire to do so.
Category: The Church Year
-
Wednesday of the First Week of Ordinary Time
Learning to discern the Lord’s voice is a big part of our development as people of God and disciples of the Lord. There are many competing voices out there, and so it takes great discernment to know which of those voices is God himself. The way that we learn this is, of course, through prayer. When we practice often enough, we will gradually find it easier to hear the Lord’s voice, and then tell him, “Here I am, Lord; I have come to do your will.”
-
Monday of the First Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings
Now that the Christmas season has come to its close, it’s time to get down to business. And Jesus does so quickly. John has been arrested, so there is no time like the present to keep the word out there. Just as John preached a baptism for the forgiveness of sins, so Jesus preaches a whole Gospel for the forgiveness of sins. The task for us to is to repent and to believe. As we begin the Ordinary Time of our Church year, we may find in necessary to do some more repenting ourselves so that our belief can be stronger in this coming year.
-
The Baptism of the Lord
What wonderful words we have in today’s Gospel to close out the Christmas season: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well-pleased.”
We have come a long way since December the 25th. Jesus, the Son of God has become the son of Mary, and has sanctified the world by his most merciful coming. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity has taken on flesh and become one like us in all things but sin. He took that flesh as the lowliest of all: as a baby born to a poor young family in the tiniest, poorest region of a small nation.
But during his Epiphany, which we have been celebrating ever since last Sunday, we saw the importance of this Emmanuel, God with us. Magi came from the East to give him symbolic gifts: gold for a king, frankincense for the High Priest, and myrrh for his burial. Today, the Epiphany continues with the second traditional reading of the Epiphany: the Baptism of Jesus. Obviously, Jesus didn’t need to partake of the baptism of John, because it was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. But Jesus’ taking part in that baptism manifests himself as One who has come to be with sinners, to take on their sinfulness, and to sanctify those waters of baptism so that they can wipe away our sins.
And here’s a wonderful thing: even though the Christmas season officially ends today, we continue to celebrate it in some ways, all the way up to Candlemas day, February the 2nd. We see that especially this year, because next week, we get the third traditional reading of the Epiphany, the Wedding Feast at Cana, in which Christ is manifested in his ministry, ready or not.
The secret to our celebration of the Epiphany is that we must be ready to accept the manifestation of Jesus in our own lives. We have to let him be our king and priest, accepting his death for our salvation. We have to celebrate our own baptism, which is only significant because Christ has gone through it first, long before us, sanctifying the waters. We have to let him minister to us as he did at the wedding feast, giving us the very best of food and drink, in great abundance, to nourish us into eternal life.
This is the One with whom the Father was well-pleased; he is the One with whom we are in awe. We are moved to silence before our Christ who came most mercifully to sanctify our way to heaven. That silence can only be appropriately broken by the exclamation of the Father: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well-pleased!”
-
Wednesday after Epiphany
We still need more light, don’t we? Just like the disciples who don’t yet get who this Jesus is and what he’s about, sometimes we too struggle with that. Jesus was doing amazing things among the disciples and they didn’t yet understand. Jesus is doing amazing things among us and sometimes we don’t get it either. The Epiphany of the Lord, which we continue to celebrate today, continues to shed light on who Jesus is for us and for the world. Today, may we open our eyes to the brightness of his coming.
-
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
Mother Seton is a major figure of the Catholic Church in the United States. Her accomplishments contributed greatly to the growth of Catholicism in this country. She founded the first American religious community for women, the Sisters of Charity. She opened the first American parish school and established the first American Catholic orphanage. All this she did in the span of 46 years while raising her five children.
And she didn’t start out Catholic. She was born to an Episcopalian family and married an Episcopalian, William Seton, bearing five children with him before his untimely death. At 30, Elizabeth was widowed, penniless, with five small children to support.
While in Italy with her dying husband, Elizabeth witnessed Catholicity in action through family friends. She was drawn to Catholicism because of the Real Presence, devotion to Mary, and the apostolic succession which led back to the original Apostles and to Christ. She converted to Catholicism in 1805, and because of that, many of her family rejected her.
But perseverance was a special aspect of her spirituality. She wrote to her sisters: “Perseverance is a great grace. To go on gaining and advancing every day, we must be resolute, and bear and suffer as our blessed forerunners did. Which of them gained heaven without a struggle?”
It is especially appropriate that we celebrate St. Elizabeth’s feast day during this season of Epiphany. Just as we hear in the Gospel that Christ continued to come and shed more light on the people, so her life radiated with light that led to our Savior. And the light of Christ’s most merciful coming has continued to shine in our Church, through the hard work and intercession of saints like Elizabeth Ann Seton.
-
Mary, the Mother of God
My mother has a lot of stories about me as I was growing up. Some of them are funny or interesting, others are just a little painful or embarrassing. I suspect your mother has or had stories like that about you too. Maybe they are funny or maybe they are sad, but these are the stories that make us cringe a little bit when we hear them.
I wonder how Jesus felt about the stories Mary remembered about him. Probably they didn’t make him cringe! Luke tells us of all the amazing things that were observed and said about Jesus, even in his infancy, and all these things are what Mary kept and reflected on in her heart. I think it’s fair to say that she probably didn’t understand all of them at the time, or at least she didn’t know where they were leading, although she certainly knew that her son was someone very special, the Son of God. And so she keeps all these things and reflects on them in her heart. She is the first, really, to receive the Gospel – observing it, as it were, while it was happening and unfolding. And so she is the model for all of us hearers of the Word; we too catch little phrases or episodes that we later reflect on in our hearts. When we first hear them, it might well be that we don’t understand them. But we know that we can later reflect on them in our hearts, and the Holy Spirit will reveal their meaning.
The Church gives us this wonderful feast of Mary on this, the octave day of Christmas. In a very real way, the Church still celebrates this day as Christmas day – that’s one of the wonderful things about being Catholic. We don’t have to cast off Christmas with the wrapping paper; we get to celebrate for many days. But to celebrate the eighth day of Christmas as the feast of Mary, the Mother of God is a wonderful and appropriate thing to do. We all know that if Mary hadn’t said “yes” to God’s invitation and cooperated with his plan for her, that salvation history might have gone rather poorly, to say the least. We are indebted to Mary’s faith, a faith which made possible the salvation of the whole world and everyone ever to live in it.
More than that, Mary’s faith is a model for us. We often do not know where God is leading us, but in faith we are called to say “yes” anyway. How willing are we to do that? We are often called upon to take a leap of faith, make a fiat, and cooperate with God’s saving plan for us and for others. Just like Mary, we have no way of knowing where that might lead us; just like Mary, that might lead to heartache and sorrow; but just like Mary, it may lead to redemption beyond belief, beyond anything we can imagine.
And so, yes, Mary is the Mother of God. And let me tell you, this was a doctrine that didn’t come without a price. People fought over whether a human woman could ever be the mother of God. How would that be possible? But the alternative, really, would be to say that Jesus was not God, because we clearly know that Mary was his mother. So to say that Mary was not the Mother of God is to say in a very real and precarious way that Jesus was not God, and we know just as surely that that would be incorrect. Jesus was fully human but also fully divine, his human and divine natures intertwined in his person without any separation or division or degradation of one nature at the expense of another. And so, as theologians teach us, Mary is the Mother of God the Word according to his human nature. Sister Sarah made us memorize that in seminary, and every once in a while, when I’m feeling particularly theologically courageous, I reflect on that statement and marvel at its beauty.
So, Mary is the Mother of God, but Mary is also the Mother of the Church, leading its members to her son Jesus and to faith in God. She is mother of priests, caring for us in a special way and interceding for the faithful completion of our mission. She is the mother of mothers, interceding for them and showing them how to nurture faith in their children. She is the mother of the faithful, showing us how to cooperate fully with God’s plan. She is mother of scripture scholars and those who just love the scriptures, having seen the Word unfold before her and treasuring it in her heart. She is the mother of disciples, having been the first of the disciples and the most dedicated of them all. She is the Mother of God, and our mother, and we cannot sing our Christmas carols without singing her praises too. We honor her faith and example today, and we ask for her intercession for our lives, for our families, for our Church and our world.
Pray for us, o holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
-
Sixth Day in the Octave of Christmas
What did you get for Christmas? Was it everything you’d hoped for? Perhaps you, like me, are at the stage where the gifts are nice, but being together at Christmas is the real gift. Today’s first reading is exhorting us to something similar. While the rest of the world waits in line for hours to get the coveted gift of the year, we have the consolation of knowing that nothing like that is ultimately important, or will ever make us ultimately happy. The real gift that we can receive today, and every day, is the gift of Jesus, the Word made flesh, our Savior come to be one with us as Emmanuel.
St. John tells us quite clearly: “Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Because what we have is so much better than anything the world can give. The real gift this Christmas, and really every day, is the gift of eternal life. And we have that gift because Jesus came to earth and chose to be one with us in our human nature. That’s why the angels sang that night, and why we sing his praise every day of our lives.
-
The Holy Innocents
Right here in the middle of the joy of the Christmas Octave, we have the feast of what seems to be an incredibly horrible event. All of the male children in the vicinity of Bethlehem two years old and younger are murdered by the jealous and, quite frankly, rather pathetic Herod. But not only are his plans to kill the Christ Child (and thus remove any threat to his reign) thwarted by the providence of God, but also the horror of this event is transfigured into something rather glorious in terms of the Kingdom of God.
As I said, in some ways, this is a horrible feast. But the Church, in recognizing the contribution of the Holy Innocents to the kingdom, asserts that this is just the beginning of the world’s seeing the glory of Jesus Christ. As disgusting and repugnant as Herod’s actions are to our sensibilities, yet these innocent children bear witness to the Child Jesus. St. Quodvoltdeus, an African bishop of the fifth century writes of them:
The children die for Christ, though they do not know it. The parents mourn for the death of martyrs. The Christ child makes of those as yet unable to speak fit witnesses to himself. But you, Herod, do not know this and are disturbed and furious. While you vent your fury against the child, you are already paying him homage, and do not know it.
To what merits of their own do the children owe this kind of victory? They cannot speak, yet they bear witness to Christ. They cannot use their limbs to engage in battle, yet already they bear off the palm of victory.
I think the key to making sense of all this is in the first reading. The line that really catches me, because it seems almost erroneous in light of the horrible event we remember today, is “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.” We can see all kinds of darkness in an event like the murder of these innocent children. Yet only God could turn something that horrible around to his glory. They may have lived extremely short lives on earth, yet their lives in eternity were secured forever. They become some of the first to participate in the kingdom that Christ would bring about through his Paschal Mystery.
-
The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph
It’s certainly appropriate that we celebrate the Holy Family today, just a few days after Christmas. This feast helps to underscore that Jesus came to live among us in a very ordinary way: by taking flesh and becoming one of us, even to being part of a family. So we look on the manger scenes that still are on display here in church and in our homes, and we see Jesus, Mary and Joseph beginning their lives together. We still sing Christmas carols that extol the peace of his coming.
Our thoughts about that beautiful family might run along the lines of “how nice for them!” I’m aware that some families who are here today may have just managed to get here on time, or a little after. Maybe there was the constant argument with the kids about why they have to go to church. Or maybe someone wasn’t quite ready on time. It might have been hard to turn off the television or tear someone away from whatever it was they just got for Christmas. And so, as they hustle in here to church and sit down, maybe the holiness of the family is, perhaps, the furthest thing from their minds.
So it can be hard to relate, I think, to the Holy Family in some ways. Maybe you’re thinking, “How do I get one of those?” There are all sorts of families out there: families broken by divorce or separation, families marked by emotional or physical abuse, families fractured by living a great distance apart, families grieving the loss of loved ones or agonizing over the illness of one of the members, families of great means and those touched by poverty, homelessness and hunger, families divided by immigration issues, families torn by family secrets, grudges and age-old hurts. Some are trying to form a family: they want to have children, but are unable. There are healthy families and hurting families, and every one of them is graced by good and touched by some kind of sadness at some point in their history.
Even the Holy Family, whose feast we celebrate today, was marked with challenges. An unexpected – and almost inexplicable – pregnancy marked the days before the couple was officially wed; news of the child’s birth touched chords of jealousy and hatred in the hearts of the nation’s leaders and caused the young family to have to flee for their lives and safety. Even this Holy Family was saddened, in some ways, by an extremely rocky beginning.
The institution of the family is an extremely precarious thing. We know this. God knows this. Yet it was into this flawed structure that the God of all the earth chose to come into our world. Taking our flesh and joining a human family, Christ came to be Emmanuel, God with us, and sanctify the whole world by his most merciful coming.
St. Paul exhorts us all to be marked by holiness, part of the family of God. We do this, he tells us, by showing one another “heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do.” Living in a family, living the Christian life, requires sacrifice. Some days we don’t feel very compassionate, but we are still called to be that way. We might not feel like showing someone kindness, or patience, or being humble. But that’s what disciples do. But the real sticking point is that whole forgiveness thing. Because all of us are going to fail in compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience at one time or another. So just as the Lord has forgiven us, so many times and of so many things, so must we forgive one another. We live our whole lives trying to figure out how to do this.
Even today’s Gospel portrays for us the challenges of the family. The Gospel event, if it played out today, would be an Amber Alert! Jesus is lost on a journey, and a frantic search turns up nothing. It is only in returning to Jerusalem that they find Jesus, right where he’s apparently supposed to be: debating with the religious leaders in the temple. Even so, one wonders if he did not end up grounded until he was thirty, based on the fact that we don’t see him again in the Gospel until he is a man beginning his ministry!
And so I think what we’re supposed to be seeing in the Holy Family today is not some kind of idyllic perfection. Certainly they attained more perfection than any of us could ever possibly hope for in this life, but that’s not what we’re supposed to be focusing on. What I think is worth focusing on is that, even though they knew there would be hard times ahead for them, they faithfully lived their lives through it all. They continued to be a family, Jesus continued to grow and become strong in his human nature, and to be filled with wisdom and the favor of God. And that, for us, is something worth striving for. Being perfect might seem impossible, but being faithful is possible and it leads us to holiness.
For Jesus, Mary and Joseph, their faithfulness helped them to absorb the challenges of an unplanned pregnancy and the dangers of oppression from the government, and still shed light on the whole world. For us, faithfulness can help us to get through whatever rough spots life may have in store for us and not break apart.
I am aware, however, that as I speak about faithfulness, that it all can still seem insurmountable. Why should you be faithful when the hurts inflicted by other members of your family still linger? That’s a hard one to address, but we’re not told to be faithful just when everyone else is faithful. Sometimes we are called to make an almost unilateral decision to love and respect the others in our families, and let God worry about the equity of it all. I know that’s easier to say than to do, but please you have your Church family to support you with prayer and love as you do it.
Every single one of us is called to be holy, brothers and sisters. And every single one of our families is called to be holy. That doesn’t mean that we will be perfect. Some days we will be quite far from it. But it does mean that we will be faithful in love and respect. It means that we will unite ourselves to God in prayer and worship. It means we will love when loving is hard to do. Mary loved Jesus all the way to the Cross and watched him die. What we see in the model of the Holy Family for us is not perfection, but faithfulness and holiness.
That holiness will make demands of us. It did for Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Mary may have kept today’s Gospel event, along with many other events, in her heart, but they had to be hard to understand in the moment. Yet they continued to live their lives, aided by the Spirit of God, and they all grew strong in wisdom and grace. Those same blessings are intended for us to, all of us who do our best to live according to the Spirit in our own human families, no matter what those families may look like.
You must be logged in to post a comment.