Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: salvation

  • The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    Today’s readings

    Blessed Pope Pius IX instituted the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary on December 8, 1854, when he proclaimed as truth the dogma that our Lady was conceived free from the stain of original sin.  This had been a traditional belief since about the eighth century, and had been celebrated as a feast first in the East, and later in the West.  So let us be clear that this celebration pertains to the conception of Mary, and not that of Jesus, whose conception we celebrate on the feast of the Annunciation on March 25.  It’s easy to keep this straight if you remember the math: nine months after this date is September 8th, the feast of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Nine months after the Annunciation is December 25th, or Christmas, the feast of the birth of our Savior.

    Today’s feast celebrates our faith that God loves the world so much that he sent his only Son to be our Savior, and gave to him a human mother who was chosen before the world began to be holy and blameless in his sight.  This feast is a sign for us of the nearness of our salvation; that the plan God had for us before the world ever took shape was finally coming to fruition.  How appropriate it is, then, that we celebrate the Immaculate Conception just before Christmas, when our salvation begins to unfold.

    The readings chosen for this day paint the picture.  In the reading from Genesis, we have the story of the fall.  The man and the woman had eaten of the fruit of the tree that God had forbidden them to eat.  Because of this, they were ashamed and covered over their nakedness.  God noticed that, and asked about it.  He found they had discovered the forbidden tree because otherwise they would not have the idea that their natural state was shameful; they had not been created for shame.  Sin had entered the world, and God asks the man to tell him who had given him the forbidden fruit.

    This leads to a rather pathetic deterioration of morality, as the man blames not just the woman, but also God, for the situation: “The woman whom you put here with me: she gave me fruit from the tree, and so I ate it.”  In other words, if God hadn’t put the woman there with him in the first place, he never would have received the fruit to eat.  The woman, too, blames someone else: the serpent.  As if neither of them had been created with a brain to think for themselves, they begin that blame game in which we all participate from time to time.

    Thus begins the pattern of sin and deliverance that cycles all through the scriptures.  God extends a way to salvation to his people, the people reject it and go their own way.  God forgives, and extends a new way to salvation.  Thank God he never gets tired of pursuing humankind and offering salvation, or we would be in dire straits.  It all comes to perfection in the event we celebrate today.  Salvation was always God’s plan for us and he won’t rest until that plan comes to perfection.  That is why St. Paul tells the Ephesians, and us, today: “He chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him.   In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ…”

    And so, in these Advent days, we await the unfolding of the plan for salvation that began at the very dawn of the world in all its wonder.  God always intended to provide an incredible way for his people to return to them, and that was by taking flesh and walking among us as a man.  He began this by preparing for his birth through the Immaculate Virgin Mary – never stained by sin, because the one who conquered sin and death had already delivered her from sin.  He was then ready to be born into our midst and to take on our form.  With Mary’s fiat in today’s Gospel, God enters our world in the most intimate way possible, by becoming vulnerable, taking our flesh as one like us, and as the least among us: a newborn infant born to a poor family.  Mary’s lived faith – possible because of her Immaculate Conception – makes possible our own lives of faith and our journeys to God.  There’s a wonderful Marian prayer called the Alma Redemptoris Mater that the Church prays at the conclusion of Night Prayer during the Advent and Christmas seasons that sums it all up so beautifully.  Pray it with me, if you know it:

    Loving Mother of the Redeemer,
    Gate of heaven, star of the sea,
    Assist your people
    who have fallen yet strive to rise again.
    To the wonderment of nature you bore your Creator,
    yet remained a virgin after as before.
    You who received Gabriel’s joyful greeting,
    have pity on us, poor sinners.

    Our celebration today has special meaning for us.  Because Mary was conceived without sin, we can see that sin was never intended to rule us.  Because God selected Mary from the beginning, we can see that we were chosen before we were ever in our mother’s womb.  Because Mary received salvific grace from the moment of her conception, we can catch a glimpse of what is to come for all of us one day.  Mary’s deliverance from sin and death was made possible by the death and resurrection of her Son Jesus, who deeply desires that we all be delivered in that way too.

    Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.  Amen.

  • Monday of the Nineteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Nineteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Things are starting to get real for those first followers of Jesus.  Jesus speaks to his disciples at the beginning of today’s Gospel reading about his impending demise.  He foretells that he will be handed over and killed.  And the disciples are overwhelmed with grief.  Certainly we can resonate with their grief.  They’ve been following him and living day-in and day-out with him for quite some time now, and just when they are really starting to appreciate his message and mission, he’s talking about the end of it all.

    We don’t have to spiritualize things too much to grieve ourselves over Jesus’ death.  Because we know what brought about that painful, humiliating death: our many sins.  Both our personal sins and the sins of our society have caused the evil which made his death the necessary means of salvation.  And so, as we look up there on that cross, well, we might feel a bit of grief ourselves over such great suffering for so much evil.

    But we can’t miss what the disciples seem to have missed.  Right after the foretells his handing over and death, and before Matthew comments on their overwhelming grief, Jesus says this: “and he will be raised on the third day.”  Now, granted, they had no idea what that meant, so probably it couldn’t have been much comfort for them.  But we do know what it means – it means everything!  Yes, the weight of our sins is ponderous, but they don’t define us.  Yes, the evil in our world is overwhelming, but it is not triumphant.  Yes, death is sorrowful, but it is not the end.  It wasn’t for Jesus, and it doesn’t have to be the end for us either, if we believe in him and follow him and live the Gospel.

  • Friday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s readings give us a look at an age-old argument over the concept of justification by faith alone.  Not only does James have to deal with it in his community, but during the protestant reformation, this concept was a major stumbling block which has only recently been healed – somewhat.  As tends to be the case with arguments like this, the quibble is largely over semantics.  I think we agree with the basic concept.

    The quibble was that some people felt that they could earn their salvation by doing enough works.  This degenerated particularly in the years prior to the reformation to a feeling that one could literally buy salvation by giving money to the Church.  The corruption that was bred in that atmosphere is largely what caused the rift in the Church.

    The truth is this: nobody can ever work hard enough to earn his or her salvation.  There is no way we can ever even begin to atone for the enormity of our many sins, or get to heaven by our paltry human efforts.  Only God can give us salvation, and it is just that: a gift.  Completely undeserved, totally unearned; it is only by the will of God that we are saved.  But we have to be receptive to the gift, and the way that we get there is by faith.  People of faith have a relationship with God and the Church which makes it possible for them to receive the gift that God wants to give them.

    But there is also a certain amount of truth that says that faith spurs us on to action.  Indeed, any kind of so-called faith that allows a person to sit idle and not respond to the needs of others is a fraud.  A faith that says I don’t have to gather with others to worship because I can do that just as well on my own is no faith at all.  Faith spurs us on to action in charity and worship, because that is what faith does.  So, as Saint James well says today, faith without works is useless.

    Jesus was pretty clear on that point, and we see it in today’s Gospel: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”  Denial, taking up the cross, following after Jesus – which really means doing what Jesus did, all of these are works that a person does because he or she has been moved by faith.

    We need both faith and works, but only those works that are genuinely spawned by our lively faith.  When we have embraced both aspects of salvation, we will be very near to the kingdom of God!

  • The First Sunday of Advent [B]

    The First Sunday of Advent [B]

    Today’s readings

    To you, I lift up my soul, O my God.
    In you, I have trusted; let me not be put to shame.
    Nor let my enemies exult over me;
    and let none who hope in you be put to shame.

    Those are the very first words in our new Roman Missal’s Proper of Time.  This is today’s proper entrance antiphon, and with these words, the Church begins the new Church year.  We stand here on the precipice of something new: a new translation of our Liturgy, a new Church year, a new season of grace.  We eagerly await God’s new creation, lifting up souls full of hope and expectation.  We come to this place and time of worship to take refuge from the laughing enemies that pursue us into our corner of the world.  And yet we wait for God on this first day of the year, keenly aware that our waiting will not be unrewarded.  This is Advent, the season whose name means “coming” and stands before us as a metaphor of hope for a darkened world, and a people darkened by sin.

    I sure think Isaiah had it right in today’s first reading, didn’t he?  “Why do you let us wander, O Lord, from your ways,” he cries, “and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?”  What a wonderful question for all of us – it’s a question that anyone who has struggled with a pattern of sin has inevitably asked the Lord at one time or another.  He goes on to pray “Would that you might meet us doing right, and that we were mindful of you in our ways!”  We so much want to break free of the chains of sin and sadness, and turn back to our God, but so often, sin gets in the way.

    Whether it’s our own personal sin, which is certainly cause enough for sadness, or the sin in which we participate as a society, there’s a lot of darkness out there.  Wars raging all over the world, abortions happening every day of the year, the poor going unfed and dying of starvation here and abroad.  Why does God let all of this happen?

    On Thanksgiving, one of the topics of conversation at the dinner table was who was going to get up at what unheard of hour to go shopping on Black Friday.  I decided to forego those particular festivities.  We know, though, that many did go out and shop for the bargains, and it seems like this traditional shopping day gets worse all the time.  This year, the news spoke of skirmishes and violence in at least a couple of different stores.  What kind of people have we become?  Is this the way we should be preparing for Christmas – the celebration of the Incarnation of our Lord?  Why does God let us wander so far from his ways?  Why doesn’t he just rend the heavens and come down and put a stop to all this nonsense?

    There is only one answer to this quandary, and that’s what we celebrate in this season of anticipation.  There has only ever been one answer.  And that answer wasn’t just a band-aid God came up with on the fly because things had gone so far wrong.  Salvation never was an afterthought.  Jesus Christ’s coming into the world was always the plan.

    I’ve been thinking about some of my favorite Advent hymns this week.  One of my favorites is “O Come, Divine Messiah,” a seventeenth-century French carol translated into English in the late nineteenth century.  It sings of a world in silent anticipation for the breaking of the bondage of sin that could only come in one possible way, and that is in the person of Jesus Christ:

    O Christ, whom nations sigh for,
    Whom priest and prophet long foretold,
    Come break the captive fetters;
    Redeem the long-lost fold.

    Dear Savior haste;
    Come, come to earth,
    Dispel the night and show your face,
    And bid us hail the dawn of grace.

    O come, divine Messiah!
    The world in silence waits the day
    When hope shall sing its triumph,
    And sadness flee away.

    As we prepare to remember the first coming of our Savior into our world, we look forward with hope and eagerness for his second coming too.  You’ll be able to hear that expressed in the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer today.  That second coming, for which we live in breathless anticipation, will finally break the captive fetters and put an end to sin and death forever.  That is our only hope, our only salvation, really the only hope and salvation that we could ever possibly need.

    We want our God to meet us doing right.  And so our task now is to wait, and to watch.  Waiting requires patience: patience to enjoy the little God-moments that become incarnate to us in the everyday-ness of our lives.  Patience to accept this sinful world as it is and not as we would have it, patience to know that, as Isaiah says, we are clay and God is the potter, and he’s not done creating, or re-creating the world just yet.  And so we watch for signs of God’s goodness, for opportunities to grow in grace, for faith lived by people who are the work of God’s hands.

    We wait and we watch knowing – convinced – that God will rend the heavens and come down to us again one day; that Christ will return in all his glory and gather us back to himself, perfecting us and allowing hope to sing its triumph so loud that all the universe can hear it, dispelling the night and putting sadness to flight once and for all.

  • Friday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Jesus says to us today, “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.”  This includes all of us, past, present and future.  We will all live, in some way, to see the end of days, either here on earth, or from the joy of heaven.

    So what will we see; what things will take place?  We will see the signs of a new creation.  Just like the first buds of the fig tree and other trees that Jesus spoke about, all of which signaled the beginning of summer, so the signs of the new creation are evident among us.  Sins are forgiven, people return to God, miracles happen.  Granted, all these are imperfect in some ways now, given that they happen to us fallen creatures, but one day they shall be brought to perfection in the kingdom of God.  Then, we will see “the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

    And so, in these closing days of the Church year, we pray for the coming of the kingdom, and hope for the salvation of the world as Jesus promised.

  • Monday of the Thirty-third Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Thirty-third Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Right at the end of today’s first reading is one of the most chilling lines in all of Scripture: “and they did die.”  The people’s faith was sorely tested: would they give in and worship the false gods of the people around them so that they could have some kind of peace and security, or would they prefer to stand up for what they believed and more likely than not, give their lives for their faith?  Many gave up and gave in and worshipped the false gods.  But many stood their ground and clung to their belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

    But, let’s be clear about this: they all died.  In some way.  Those who were martyred literally gave their lives for the faith, we get that.  But those who chose to give up and give in brought about the death of their culture and the death of their souls.  Sure, they may have had some kind of peace and security now, but who would protect them if the people they allied themselves with were overtaken?  And that is to say nothing of their eternal souls.  They did die.

    The persecution never ends.  It would be easier in our own day to give in and accept abortion as a necessity, or to accept whatever special interest groups think is best for us, or keep our faith private and never share it or show it in any way.  Our culture would like that; they would appreciate our willingness to blend in and not give offense.  But that would be the death of our way of life and our spirituality.  It will surely cost us to witness to our faith, to challenge co-workers when a business deal blurs the lines of morality, to insist that our children attend Church on Sunday before they go to a weekend-long soccer tournament, or whatever the challenge may be.

    But better that we die a little for our faith than that we die without faith at all.

  • Monday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    God’s salvation is radical.  Zechariah, in the first reading, is speaking to the broken Israel.  On account of its sins, it was taken into captivity and exiled to Babylon.  The fate they suffered was well deserved.  Generations had rejected the Lord’s covenant, had instead turned to the pagan gods worshipped by the people in the surrounding areas.  They had profaned the temple with the worship of foreign gods and every one of their kings led them to evil upon evil.  So why would the Lord ever care about them again?  Couldn’t he just throw up his hands and say, “I’m done”?

    But he doesn’t say that.  He’s not done.  He fully intends to restore the people, gathering them from the land of the rising sun and from the land of the setting sun, that is from the east to the west, and from the beginning to the end, everywhere over all the earth, in every time and place, and gather them back to himself, restoring Israel and making Jerusalem a holy city once again.

    All of this is a metaphor for our own need for salvation, of course.  How often have we as a culture rejected God’s covenant?  How much have we as individuals sinned?  How much have our leaders led us to the worship of foreign gods, like wealth and power?  We too have found evil upon evil and have rejected our God.  We would well deserve it if he threw up his hands in our midst and said to us, “I’m done.”

    But he doesn’t say that.  He’s not done.  He fully intends to gather us from wherever we have wandered, whenever we have fallen away.  No place is beyond the reach of our God who longs to bring us back to himself.  There is no place that we can go that is beyond God’s love.  It is never too late to experience salvation.  Nothing is impossible for our God who made us for himself.

    God’s salvation is radical.

  • Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord: The Easter Vigil

    Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord: The Easter Vigil

    Tonight’s readings

    We English-speakers have just one word for time, but other languages have more; those languages recognize the different kinds of time.  Most notably for us because it is reflected in the New Testament, the Greek language has two kinds of time: chronos and kairos.  Chronos is the kind of time you can measure.  It’s a day or a week or even the timeline of a project at work.  Kairos on the other hand can be thought of as quality time: a summer afternoon spent with your family, a visit to a sick loved one, or a chance encounter with an old friend.  This kind of time is mostly unmeasurable, and in some sense kairos is always “now.”

    It’s important to keep these kinds of time in mind because the world sometimes sees time in a rather cynical way.   But that’s not how our God sees time.  Did you hear what we prayed at the very beginning of tonight’s vigil?  Listen again: “Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to him, and all ages, to him be glory and power through every age forever.  Amen.”  And these are important, even brave words for us to offer on this most holy night.  Tonight’s vigil proclaims that all time is holy, sanctified by our God who has walked with us through our yesterdays, remains with us today, and forges on with us toward our tomorrows.  There is not a single moment of our life, not a single moment of our history that is not holy because every moment has been, is now, and always will be imbued with the presence of our God who is holiness itself.  That’s what we gather to celebrate on this holy night.

    But as we have walked through Lent, and especially through this Holy Week, there may even be a temptation, I think, to come to think that the world, and especially human history, was a creative experiment that went horribly wrong, that God sent his Son to clean up the mess only to have him killed for it, and then in a last move of desperation raised him up out of the grave.  But we know that’s not right.  Salvation was not some kind of dumb luck or happy accident.  The salvation of the world had been part of God’s creative plan all along.  Humanity, given the grace of free will had, and has, certainly gone astray.  But God did not create us simply to follow our own devices and end up in hell.  He created us for himself, and so sent his Son Jesus to walk our walk, to die our death, and to rise up over it all in the everlasting promise of eternal life.  That’s what we celebrate on this most holy of all nights.

    There is a cynical view of our world that would have us believe that everything is futile and that the only possible way to endure this world is to cultivate a kind of cynical apathy that divorces us from our God, our loved ones, our communities and our world.  We are conditioned to believe that time, and life itself, is meaningless, that there is nothing worth living for, and certainly nothing worth dying for.  But tonight’s vigil debunks all of that.  Tonight we are assured by our God that our present is no less redeemable than was our past, nor is it any less filled with promise than is our future.

    Tonight we have heard stories of our salvation.  Each of our readings has been a stop in the history of God’s love for us.  God’s plan for salvation, and his sanctification of time, began back at the beginning of it all.  Each of the days was hallowed with precious creation, and all of it was created and pronounced good.  Then Abraham’s faithfulness and righteousness earned us a future as bright as a zillion twinkling stars.  Later, as Moses and the Israelites stood trapped by the waters of the red sea, God’s providence made a way for them and cut off their pursuers, making the future safe for those God calls his own.  The prophet Isaiah calls us to seek the Lord while he may be found, not spending our lives on things that fail to satisfy, but investing in our relationship with God that gives us everything.  The prophet Ezekiel foretells the recreation all humanity will experience as they come to know Christ and are filled with the Spirit.  St. Paul rejoices in the baptism that has washed away the stains of sin as we have died and risen with Christ, and has brought us into a new life that leads ultimately to God’s kingdom.  And finally, our Gospel tonight tells us not to be afraid, to go forth into the Galilee of our future and expect to see the Lord.

    We Christians have been spared the necessity of a cynical view of the world and its people.  Our gift has been and always is the promise that Jesus Christ is with us forever, even until the end of the world.  And so, just as God sanctified all of time through his interventions of salvation, so too he has sanctified our lives through the interventions of Sacrament.  We are a sacramental people, purified and reborn in baptism, fed and strengthened in the Eucharist, and in Confirmation, set on fire to burn brightly and light up our world.  Tonight we recall these three Sacraments of Initiation and recommit ourselves to the promises of our baptism.  Also, for the first time since Thursday, we have the opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist together, drawing strength from the food our God provides.

    These days of Lent have been a sanctifying journey for all of us, as we have walked the Stations of the Cross together, attended our parish mission, celebrated the sacraments, spent time before the Eucharist, gathered as a community for a fish fry or pizza fest or a soup and bread supper, and so much more.  Christ has definitely sanctified this Lenten time for all of us, and has now brought us to the fullness of this hour, when he rises over sin and death to bring us all to the promise of life eternal.

    And it is this very night that cleanses our world from all the stains of sin and death and lights up the darkness.  The Exsultet, the Easter Proclamation that I sang when we entered Church tonight, tells us: “Of this night, Scripture says, ‘The night will be clear as day: it will become my light, my joy.’ The power of this holy night dispels all evil, washes guilt away, restores lost innocence, brings mourners joy; it casts out hatred, brings us peace, and humbles earthly pride.”  What a gift this night is, not just to us gathered here in this church, not just to all the Catholics gathered together throughout the world on this holy night, but to all people in every time and place.  Our world needs the light and our time needs the presence of Christ, and our history needs salvation.  Blessed be God who never leaves his people without the great hope of his abiding presence!

    And so, having come through this hour to be sanctified in this vigil, we will shortly be sent forth to help sanctify our own time and place.  Brightened by this beautiful vigil, we now become a flame to light up our darkened world.  That is our ministry in the world.  That is our call as believers.  That is our vocation as disciples.  “May the Morning Star, which never sets, find this flame still burning: Christ, that Morning Star, who came back from the dead, and shed his peaceful light on all mankind, [the Son of God] who lives and reigns forever and ever.  Amen.”

     

     

  • Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion

    Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion

    Today’s readings

    Isaiah’s lament catches us up in the emotion of Good Friday.  The suffering servant’s appearance is so marred, stricken and infirm that we cannot bear to look at him.  Because if we really looked hard enough, we know, in our heart of hearts, that the marring, the strickenness, the infirmity are all ours.  This is a dark hour.  It seems like all is lost.  And we too will have dark hours of our own.  That’s one of the few guarantees that this fleeting life gives to us.  We will have to bear our own cross of suffering: the illness or death of loved ones, the loss of a job, the splintering of a family, or even the shame of addictive sin.

    It is our brokenness that we see in the suffering servant, our sinfulness on the son of man.  And this suffering one is embodied by our God, Jesus Christ our Savior, who carries all of that nastiness to the cross, and hangs there before us, bleeding and dying and crying out in agony.  That’s our sin, our death, our punishment – and he bore it all for us.  Who could believe it?

    And just when it seems like there is nothing left to give, when it seems like all hope is lost, when it seems like death has the upper hand, the soldier thrusts his lance into the side of Christ, and he pours forth the life blood and water that plants the seeds of the Church into the barren ground of the earth, guaranteeing the presence of the Lord in the world until the end of time.  Christ our God gives everything he has for us, takes away all that divides us, and performs the saving sacrifice that makes salvation possible for all people.  Our God gives up everything – everything – for love of us.

    We know that the suffering and death of Jesus is not the end of the story.  In the day ahead, we will keep vigil for the Resurrection of the Lord which shatters the hold that sin and death have on us.  We are a people who eagerly yearn for the Resurrection.  We must certainly hope for the great salvation that is ours, and the light and peace of God’s Kingdom.  But today we remember that that salvation was bought at a very dear price, the price of the death of our Savior, our great High Priest.  Today we look back on all of our sufferings of the past or the present, we even look ahead to those that may yet be.  We see all those sufferings in our suffering servant on the cross.  And as we sit here in God’s presence we know that we are never ever alone in those dark hours, that Christ has united himself to us in his suffering and death.  May we too unite ourselves to him in our own suffering, and walk confidently through it with him, pass the gates of salvation, and enter one great day into God’s heavenly kingdom.

     

  • The Third Sunday of Ordinary Time [A]

    The Third Sunday of Ordinary Time [A]

    Today’s readings

    Close to twenty years ago now, my home parish put on a production of the musical Godspell, and I ended up being part of the cast. If you’ve ever seen the musical, you know that it is based on the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel that we are reading during this Church year. I remember the first song of the musical was kind of strange to me at the time. It’s called “Tower of Babble” and the lyrics are a hodge-podge of lots of philosophies and philosophers throughout time. I didn’t get, at the time, the significance of the song, but I do now. “Tower of Babble” represents the many attempts to come to understand God and thus to come to some kind of control over him, over time. It shows how philosophy at its worst has been an attempt to figure out God by going over God’s head, by leaving God out of the picture completely.

    The song ends abruptly and goes right into the second song of the musical, “Prepare Ye,” of which the major lyric is “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” The author’s view seems to be that the useless, and in some ways sinful, babbling of the philosophers was once and for all settled by Jesus Christ.  So if we want to know the meaning of life, if we want to know who God is, we have only to look to Jesus.  And that’s what our recent celebration of Christmas has taught us: Jesus is the human face of the invisible God, come to be one of us, incarnate among us, so that God’s presence could be revealed in the world once and for all and for ever.

    That’s what is happening in today’s Liturgy of the Word too.  The people in the first reading and in the Gospel have found themselves in darkness.  Zebulun and Naphtali have been degraded.  They have been justly punished for their sinfulness – the sin being that they thought they didn’t need God.  They thought they could get by on their own cleverness, making alliances with people who believed in strange gods and worshiped idols.  So now they find themselves occupied by the people with whom they tried to ally themselves.  Today’s first reading tells them that this subjection – well deserved as it may be – is coming to an end.  The people who have dwelt in darkness are about to see a great light.

    The same is true in another sense for Peter and Andrew and the sons of Zebedee in today’s Gospel.  These guys have been fishermen all their lives.  Further research in the Gospels would lead us to believe that they haven’t been all that successful at fishing at that! But the point is that fishing is all they’ve ever known.  These are not learned men, nor are they known for their charisma or ability to lead people.  But amazingly, these are the men who Jesus calls as apostles.  We aren’t told if these men have knew anything about Jesus, but on seeing him and hearing him and recognizing the Light of the World, they drop everything, turn their backs on the people and work and the life they have always known, and follow Jesus, whose future they could never have imagined.

    All of this is good news for us.  Because we too dwell in darkness at times, don’t we? We can turn on the news and see reports of men and women dying in war, crime and violence in our communities, and corruption in government.  Then there is the rampant disrespect for life through the absolute horror of abortion, which we remember in a special way this week on the thirty-eighth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal.  We also see darkness in euthanasia, lack of access to health care for the poor,  in rampant hunger and homelessness, in racism and hatred, and so much more.  Add to that the darkness in our own lives: illness of a family member or death of a loved one, difficulty in relating to family members, and even our own sinfulness.  Sometimes it doesn’t take much imagination to know that our world is a very dark place indeed.

    But the Liturgy today speaks to us the truth that into all of this darkness, the Light of Christ has dawned and illumined that darkness in ways that forever change our world and forever change us.  The limits that are part and parcel of our human existence are no match for the light that is God’s glory. This is what we mean by the Epiphany, and we continue to live in the light of the Epiphany in these opening days of Ordinary Time.  Now that Jesus Christ has come into the world, nothing on earth can obscure the vision of God’s glory that we see in our Savior.  Not even the darkness of our world, or the darkness of our own sin.

    So for those of us who feel like every day is a struggle of some sort, and who wonder if this life really means anything, the Good news is that Jesus has come to give meaning to our struggles and to walk with us as we go through them.  For those of us who are called to ministries for which we might feel unqualified – as catechists, Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, Lectors, RCIA team members, small group leaders or retreat leaders, even those of us called to the priesthood or diaconate – we can look to the Apostles and see that those fishermen were transformed from the darkness of their limited life to the light of what they were able to accomplish in Christ Jesus.  Wherever we feel darkness in our lives, the Good News for us is that Christ’s Epiphany – his manifestation into our world and into our lives – has overcome all that.

    So the key to overcoming the darkness is to place ourselves in the presence of the Light.  If we have sin, we should confess it and let the Light of mercy overcome the darkness of sin.  We should make a renewed effort to participate faithfully in the celebration of Mass every Sunday, Holy Day, and even weekday if we can.  We should make efforts to renew our prayer lives so that Christ’s light can burst into every moment of our day.  And when we are called to ministry, as we all are in some way, we should respond as immediately and Peter, Andrew, James and John.  We don’t know where all of that will lead us – we never do – but with all that Light in us and around us, we can never fall too far.

    As the Psalmist sings for us today, the Lord truly is our light and our salvation.