Daily Virtue

Jesus’ nature as both equally human and divine is something we may take for granted today. But back in the early days of the church, this dogma of our faith was hotly debated. In 431 A.D., during the Council of Ephesus, the title of “Mary Mother of God,” in Greek “Theotokos,” was defended and defined against the heresy of Nestorius. Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, refuted the title of “Theotokos,” claiming that Christ had two loosely united natures, and therefore, Mary was only the mother of the human part of Him. Catholic theologians rejected this claim and defined Christ as having two natures, a divine nature, and a human nature, united in one divine person. Since Christ’s two natures form one single person, Mary is the mother of the whole Person of Christ. Therefore, Mary can be properly called “Mother of God,” not in the sense that she came before God or is the source of God, but in the sense that the person that she bore in her womb is indeed a true God and true man. The Solemnity of Mary Mother of God falls exactly one week after Christmas, the end of the octave of Christmas. It is fitting to honor Mary as Mother of Jesus, following the birth of Christ. When Catholics celebrate the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God we are not only honoring Mary, who was chosen among all women throughout history to bear God incarnate, but we are also honoring our Lord, who is fully God and fully human. Calling Mary “mother of God” is the highest honor we can give Mary. Just as Christmas honors Jesus as the “Prince of Peace,” the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God honors Mary as the “Queen of Peace.”

John’s Gospel has us focusing today on the famous statement related to the Word made flesh. Bishop Robert Barron writes that ancient Jewish thought found all sorts of sophisticated ways to say that God was active in the world without ceasing to be transcendent over it. Above all, they spoke of God’s holy Word, a Word by which all things were made. Now listen to the Prologue to John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word…” John is writing a new Genesis—and he is drawing our attention to this word of God, this powerful, musical breath of God that makes and governs the universe and speaks through the prophets, this Word that is the same as God. And this Word became flesh. The Greek term means “pitched his tent among us,” the very phrase used of God’s Wisdom inhabiting the Temple in Jerusalem. “And we saw his glory…and he was full of grace and truth.” Glory, for he is beautiful to look on; truth, for he is the new Law. All the ways that the Old Testament spoke of God’s involvement with the world come together in this description of Jesus Christ. He is the powerful Word that will not return without accomplishing his purpose.

In today’s Gospel from Luke, Jesus is presented by his parents in the Temple. Present in the temple, at the time our Lord Jesus Christ was brought in, was Simeon of Jerusalem, a devout, just, elderly man. Simeon was said to have been waiting for the “Consolation of Israel”, the indescribable joy of the prophesied deliverance that the Messiah had been waited for to bring to Israel. Anna was a prophetess who followed in the company of such prophetesses as Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah in the Old Testament. Living in the Temple, Anna the prophetess had served the Lord faithfully and actively with fasting and prayer day and night, for many years. She did not excuse herself with the frailty of old age; nor consider herself too lonely or too old to actively serve the Lord. Annas life of constant prayer and fasting led to yet another bigger and more glorious, blessed experience of evangelism, happiness and thanksgiving. At the dedication service, Anna the prophetess picked up the chance and prayed a prayer of thanksgiving and had the honor of happily carrying the news of the Child, the Lord Jesus Christ, to “all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem,” to the faithful remaining in Jerusalem. In our daily, evening prayers we continue to confess and confirm in our hearts and minds that the Lord Jesus Christ is still today the salvation, God has prepared for all people, that the Lord Jesus Christ is still the Light to the gentiles, and that the Lord Jesus Christ is still the Glory of Israel in the same manner as Simeon the just elderly man had spiritually proclaimed and Anna the elderly prophetess had given thanks unto God for; and carried the pertaining Good News. May we all consider carefully the inspiring example of continuous prayer, fasting, thanksgiving and evangelism personified in and by the very aged Anna the prophetess. May we all, including the elderly among us, follow her footsteps in actively serving God in the many wonderful ways available, in anticipation of the glorious Eternal Life.

Inside of God there is a kind of family life going on and Jesus has assured us that when we give and receive from each other within a family, when we break open our lives and hearts and joys and frustrations and egos and agendas and finances and share these with each other, we are letting the life of God flow through us and we are giving skin to the inner life of the Trinity. In that sense, family life is a sacrament and, for many of us, the most important sacrament of all because it is the one that in fact touches our lives and transforms us the most deeply. To say that family life is a sacrament is not to say that it will not be fraught with pettiness, frustration, anger, jealousies, selfish concern, pathology, and even at times real sin. Our families are never the holy family! I remember my mother, a truly pious and good woman, occasionally lamenting how in her idealism she dreamed of being the mother of the holy family—and she ended up getting stuck with us! Our families are never the romanticized stuff of our adolescent or pious dreams. Nor are they ever the idealized families of literature and movies, where people are still attractive, interesting, and worthy of our understanding and sympathy even when they are petty, selfish, jealous, unfaithful, and sinful. As we know, understanding and sympathy in the midst of the muck and grime of real family life is considerably harder to crank up. All of that notwithstanding, however, unless there is present the kind of abuse that violates the soul, family life remains a sacrament—sometimes indeed because of its imperfections rather than simply in spite of them. It is in forming hearts that are big enough to love and forgive within imperfection that we ready ourselves for heaven. For many of us, coming home from the hospital to join a family will be our first baptism, our family dwelling will be our primary church, our family table our primary place of Eucharist, our living room our first sanctuary, our marriage bed our deepest experience of Eucharist, and our reconciliation with each other after the pettiness and hurts of family life our ongoing sacrament of reconciliation. It is there that the flow of the life that originates within God, and finds its perfection there, will flow through us.

St. John, whose feast we celebrated yesterday, begins the readings today with the proclamation that God is light, and in him, there is no darkness. Those who repent and receive the forgiveness of Jesus will have communion with each other and walk in the light. The Gospel today, however, is in stark contrast. There, we see the darkness of Herod at its worst. Insecure and power-hungry, he reacts to the news that the wise men tricked him by murdering all the children in Bethlehem under the age of two, hoping that way he might kill the newborn king of the Jews. That is terrible darkness indeed. The Holy Innocents we celebrate today had done nothing to deserve such a fate. This act seems senseless. However, it can remind us of all the people in the world, the voiceless and powerless, who innocently suffer from evil and greed. This feast teaches us that in God’s eyes, no one is unimportant, unnecessary, and no one doesn’t matter. However meaningless their lives and deaths may seem, they shine gloriously in heaven. The honor given to the Holy Innocents reminds us that if we suffer or die for God’s sake, it has value even if we have little or no say in it ourselves. Honoring them also honors the loss of the people these children could have become and their grandchildren. At the same time, we can remember the senseless slaughter of the innocent, often caught in the crossfire of opposing political forces. Let us pray that we may renew our baptismal commitment to die to sin and live in the light of Christ to receive forgiveness and healing.

On this Feast of Saint John, Apostle, and Evangelist, we read from the Gospel of John and are told that Mary Magdalene arrives at the tomb very early in the morning while it is still dark. She has come to anoint the body of the Lord, which had been buried in haste because of the onset of the Passover. She spies the great stone rolled back and assumes that the body has been stolen. So, she runs immediately to Simon Peter and the other disciples: “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him.” She doesn’t yet believe in the Resurrection, for she is operating still within a conventional framework. So, the two disciples, Peter and John, make a mad dash toward the tomb, the younger John outpacing the older Peter. Upon coming to the open tomb, John looks in and sees “the burial cloths.” Then Peter arrives and spies the same cloths, as well as the cloth that had covered his head “rolled up in a separate place.” Bishop Robert Barron asks in his reflection if we have ever wondered why there is such an emphasis on the burial cloths in John’s writing. The most obvious reason is that their presence is peculiar. If the body had been stolen, why would the thieves have bothered taking the elaborately wound cloths off, and why in the world would they have taken the time and effort to fold the head cloth up so carefully? When St. John entered the tomb and saw the burial cloths, he “saw and believed.” There was something about those wrappings that convinced him. I wonder whether the same thing is true today in our hyper-skeptical age. We, too, can see the cloth in which Jesus’ body was wrapped, and we understand it far more thoroughly than St. John ever could have. Does it cause us to “see and believe?”

In today’s Gospel reading from Matthew, Jesus warns his disciples that men “will hand you over to courts and scourge you.” These words are realized in the martyrdom of Saint Stephen as told in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Tradition regards Stephen as the first Christian martyr, an example of fortitude and suffering for love of Christ. Saint Cyprian, speaking of the actions taken against Stephen tells us: “Could you keep all God’s commandments, were it not for the strength of patience? That was what enabled Stephen to hold out, in spite of being stoned he did not call down vengeance on his executioners, but rather forgiveness. Through his glorious death, he was the model of all the martyrs that would come after him.” Like Jesus, Stephen dies commending his soul to God and praying for his persecutors. At this point, Saint Luke brings in Saul, who cooperates in the proceedings by watching the executioners’ clothes; Saul will soon experience the benefit of Stephen’s intercession. If Stephen had not prayed to God, the Church would not have had Paul. Stephen has died, but his example and teaching continue to speak across the world.

The word became flesh and dwelt among us. Fr. Ron Rolhesier says we should see this as a wild and unbelievable statement! The infinite heart, center, creator, and sustainer of the universe is born as a baby and lives as a human person on this earth, and through that, we are given God’s power to save. We’ve domesticated the incarnation, but the real Christmas story staggers the mind. How’s this a Christmas story? Imagine the universe: Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Hence, light traveling to the earth from the moon already takes more than a second to get here. Light traveling from the sun takes more than 8 minutes to reach Earth. But those bodies are close to us. The distance from the sun to the Earth is immense, but it is minuscule in terms of the universe. If one looks up at the stars at night, of those stars visible to the naked eye, the ones nearest to us are so far away that light traveling from them to Earth takes more than 4 years to get here. Those farthest away but still visible to the naked eye are so distant that light traveling at 186,000 miles per second takes 800,000 years to get here. That’s unimaginable. More incredulous still: Science today, using X-ray telescopes, has sighted planets whose light has not yet reached Earth. These planets are so distant that light traveling from them to Earth will take 6 trillion light years to get here. The human mind cannot stretch to imagine that. Yet this is just the universe we know. There may be, in fact, billions of galaxies and universes. Imagine this story: Given that there are perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies with trillions of light years separating them, and given that on each of the planets within these galaxies, there are hundreds of trillions of phenomena every second, can we imagine that at the center of all of this, there is one heart, one creator, one sustainer, one God who made all of this and who right now watches over it so that every individual and every detail is passionately cared about, so that “no hair falls from a human head and no sparrow from the sky” without this God knowing and caring? And most incredulous of all: Can we imagine and believe that this heart, this God, this center of everything, was carried for nine months by a peasant woman in Palestine and born into our world as a baby and then lived here, taught us, and gave us, his believers, all the powers he, himself, had as God? The word became flesh. That’s true, even for 2024. So, let’s have kisses and drinks all around.

Zechariah, the priest, was a faithful man. He was faithful to what God set before him. His job as a priest included serving in the temple in Jerusalem twice a year. It would have been an important occasion to leave his little country parish, go to the big city of Jerusalem to the temple, and enter the holy of holies and offer a sacrifice on behalf of the people of God. This shows us that God often speaks to His people when they are busy doing their daily tasks. For example, when God called Moses to lead Israel out of Pharaoh’s bondage, he was tending sheep. When God called David to run an errand that would result in the death of the mighty Goliath in the Valley of Elah, he, too, was tending sheep. When Elijah was looking for a successor to carry on his ministry, he found him plowing a field. And when God called Gideon to deliver Israel from the tyranny of the Midianites, he was threshing wheat. When Jesus called His disciples to change the world, they mended their nets. They simply were doing what was set before them. God has given us spiritual gifts as Christians. When we come to Christ and ask God to empower us with the Holy Spirit, He gives gifts of the Spirit. Romans 12:6 says, “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them.” The gifts of God don’t come fully formed. We need to take God’s gift and start using it. And we become better at what God calls us to do by doing it a lot. It isn’t easy to steer a car when the engine isn’t running. And if we want to serve the Lord, we start by going out and doing something for Him. God will give us greater opportunities if we are faithful in the little things.

John Shea once wrote a haunting poem about John the Baptist. The poem begins with the Baptist in prison, hearing the dancing above his head and knowing that this is soon to culminate in his being beheaded. Thus thinks the Baptist: 
I can denounce a king, but I cannot enthrone one.
I can strip an idol of its power but I cannot reveal the true God.
I can wash the soul in sand, but I cannot dress it in white.
I can devour the word of the Lord like wild honey, but I cannot lace his sandal.
I can condemn sin, but I cannot bear it away.
Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
Fr. Ron Rolhesier writes that John the Baptist is aware of both his strength and his impotence. He can point out what’s wrong and what should be done, but after that, he’s helpless, with nothing to offer regarding the strength needed to correct the wrong. The gospels speak of two kinds of baptisms: the baptism of John and the baptism of Jesus, adding that John’s baptism is only a preparation for Jesus’ baptism. What’s John’s baptism? It’s a baptism of repentance, realizing what we are doing wrong, and a clear resolution to correct our bad behavior. What’s Jesus’ baptism? It’s an entry into grace and community in such a way that it empowers us internally to do what is impossible for us to do by our willpower alone. There’s a mystery to all energy. But we can empirically lay out its effect: spiritual energy works. Grace works. This has been proven inside the experience of thousands of people (many of them atheists) who have been able to find an energy inside them that clearly does not come from them and yet empowers them beyond their willpower alone. Ask any addict in recovery about this. Sadly, many of us who are solid believers still haven’t grasped the lesson. We’re still trying to live out our lives alone, by John’s baptism, that is, by our own willpower. That makes us wonderful critics but leaves us mostly powerless to actually change our own lives. What we are looking for and desperately need is a deeper immersion into the baptism of Jesus, that is, into community and grace.