Sons and Brides

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Today St. Paul reminds us that we are the sons of God and joint heirs with Christ.  While we often speak about the moral life and the requirements of following Christ as His disciples, there is something that comes before morality, and if we miss this, we often see the demands of a relationship with Christ as merely laws imposed on us from without.  What comes before morality is identity.  Or, to put it another way, being precedes doing.  You have to exist before you can act, and any action you take or can take flows from what and who you are.
    Now, we might think that St. Paul should have said that we are sons and daughters of God.  Certainly in the age we live in, we can demonstrate more inclusivity and not simply reference masculine identity.  But the Apostle to the Gentiles carefully chose his words, words that God Himself inspired.  So how can we disciples, both males and females, understand what St. Paul meant when he called us all sons?  

    Our identity, ever since baptism, connects to Christ.  At Holy Baptism, we receive a new identity, and that is of Christ.  In Holy Baptism, the Holy Spirit mystically joins us to the Body of Christ, so that we are members of Him.  And in that sense, all of us are sons.  Or, to put it another way, we can speak of ourselves as sons and daughters in the Son of God.  This identity cannot be overstated.  When God looks at us, He doesn’t ignore who we are.  He created us as males and females, different, and yet complimentary.  Even our bodies tell us something about ourselves that is not accidental (this is where those who promote gender dysphoria get it wrong; having a male body or a female body tells us something about ourselves, even if it doesn’t exhaust our identity).  And yet, as soon as we die with Christ in the waters of baptism, the Holy Spirit configures us to Christ so that, already and yet in potential, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me, as St. Paul also says.  When God sees us He sees us as individuals, but also sees us as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, as His Beloved Son.
    And because God joins us to His Son, we can also call ourselves heirs of God “and joint heirs with Christ.”  All the riches that God has for His Son belong to us to, not by nature, but by adoption.  In human adoption, the child has no claim to anything from a parent not his own until that parent chooses the child, which opens up the claim to support from the parents to the adopted child.  So with us, as adopted sons and daughters in the Son of God, everything that God has for Christ, God offers to us as well.  As God Himself says in the second psalm: “‘You are my son; today I have begotten you.  Ask it of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and, as your possession, the ends of the earth.’”  God withholds nothings good from us, including eternal life and a seat at His right hand, provided we stay in God’s family and remain connected to Christ.  What good thing could God withhold from Christ?  He will not withhold it from us, either, because we are in His Son and part of Him through Holy Baptism.  Eternal life?  Ours.  Power?  Ours.  Grace to resist all temptations and never commit mortal sin?  Ours.  As St. Paul says in his first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 3: “all belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God.”
    So often we think only of what we have to do, but we ought to first think of to whom we belong and our identity.  When I know I belong to God, Catholicism no longer consists of rules to follow from without, but a means of fully living according to how God has made me and how He has configured me to Christ, so that I can be ready to receive my full inheritance as a son of God, rather than spending it elsewhere like the prodigal son.

My sister and brother-in-law at the their wedding reception

    But, lest you ladies feel like the struggle is only yours in thinking of yourselves as sons, we, all of us, are also brides.  This is where men have to struggle.  Throughout the Old and New Testament, God uses bridal imagery to describe His People.  In the Book of Hosea, Israel is compared to a wife, though an unfaithful one.  The Prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah speak about God as our husband.  And the Song of Songs allegorizes the Chosen People to a bride and God as the husband.  Likewise, in the New Testament, our Lord speaks of Himself as the Bridegroom for whom the virgins must keep watch.  In St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians, marriage is a mystery which refers back to Christ and the Church.  And in the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle, he describes heaven as a wedding feast of the Lamb of God, and the New Jerusalem is a bride adorned for her husband.
    Saints have long described the soul as a bride of Christ.  Not just the souls of women, but the souls of men.  Why?  Because there is meant to be a certain subordination of the wife to the husband, always out of love, and trusting in the husband laying down his life for the wife.  So we, the Church, Christ’s bride, should receive Christ’s law of love and obedience as a wife receives her husband.  That is why the Church has no authority to change the teachings of Christ, as so many of our Protestant brothers and sisters have tried to do, because we are not the masters of revelation, but simply the recipients and stewards of it.  The Church can develop those teachings and understand them more deeply through the centuries, but we cannot reject the ones we don’t like or find uncomfortable or inconvenient.  This is our challenge as men, who like to take charge and be in control: to give control over to the husband of our souls and submit to His rule, rather than to our own.
    Being precedes doing.  Before we do anything, we are sons of God and the Bride of Christ.  Starting with our identity makes actions much more intelligible.  The moral life no longer seems like barriers to our freedom, but ways to fully live out who and whose we are.  God wants to give us every good thing as our inheritance.  But to receive that great gift, we first must recognize that we are sons and daughters in the Son of God and our souls are the Bride of Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  

The Sacrifice God Desires

Third Sunday of Lent

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  So much of our communication connects to the culture in which we live.  For example, when I say the phrase “March Madness,” almost everyone knows that I am talking about the college basketball tournament.  But imagine, for a second, that you came from a place that had no knowledge of basketball, or even a diminished understanding of the cultural impact of college basketball.  The phrase “March Madness” would probably lead one to believe that there was a mental illness that could afflict people one month out of the year (and some may argue that the amount of attention some people pay to college basketball approaches a mental illness).   
    In the biblical word, sacrifice, as a word and an idea, was likely as ubiquitous as March Madness is in the US today.  Sacrifice was a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly part of life.  Sacrifice usually entailed the destruction of something for the benefit of the gods, so very early on other animals or plants, or sometimes even humans, were used so that one did not have to kill off one’s own race and religion to appease the gods.  When we look at Judaism, animals, plants, and liquids (but not humans) are destroyed in order to thank the one, true God for the gift of life, to ask for forgiveness, and to ask God for some future good.  Sacrifices entail entering into a relationship with God, and agreeing to do or not do certain things in the future.  The English word sacrifice comes from the Latin words sacrum, a sacred thing, and facere, to make.  To sacrifice something was to make it holy, to set it apart for God.  
    St. Paul would have had all of this in mind when he wrote about Christ offering Himself as a sacrifice to God for an odor of sweetness.  Of course, Christ already belonged to God, but He offered His human nature to the Father through the sacrifice on the cross, an offering which had a sweet odor, as in precious incense, which represents prayers rising to God.  Christ did not need to become holy, set apart for God, but He offered our human nature so that all those who joined themselves to Christ through holy Baptism, could also be set apart for God.

    In times past, sacrifice often included animals.  Noah, after just rescuing animals from the great flood, immediately kills some of them once the flood recedes to thank God for saving him and his family.  Abraham sacrifices a ram, in place of his son Isaac, after the angel stays Abraham’s hand.  And the unblemished lamb is slaughtered and its blood is spread over the lintels of the door to prevent the angel of death from killing the first born of Israel.  Blood signified life, and so the pouring out of blood meant the offering of life of the animal.
    But God, though the prophets, instructs the people that the sacrifice He really wants is a life given, no longer through the shedding of blood, but through right living, following His ways, and loving others as God loves us.  In Psalm 39, the psalmist prays, “Sacrifice and offering you do not want; you opened my ears.  Holocaust and sin-offering you do not request; so I said, ‘See, I come…to do your will, my God.’”  The Prophet Isaiah speaks for God and says that God does not care so much for the sacrifices of the Temple, as for living according to the way of the Lord.  Isaiah says: “cease doing evil; learn to do good.  Make justice your aim: redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow.”  Through the Prophet Hosea God says, “it is mercy I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings,” a phrase that our Lord uses after He calls St. Matthew and goes to dine at his house.
    Through salvation history, God has led His people to think of sacrifice as something we do to an animal or grain or wine, to something we give of ourselves, which is the deeper meaning.  But we don’t have to destroy our physical life.  Rather, God wants to destroy in us by His grace all of the spiritual shortcomings that we have so that we can make more room in our souls for His grace.  God wants us to offer ourselves, not through the shedding of blood, or the burning of grains or incense, but by the shedding of all that is fallen in us, and the sending on high all the good that we desire to do.  God has received the blood that brings us into relationship with Him, the Precious Blood of our Lord, the true Passover Lamb.  He wants our joys and sorrows, our work and our leisure, our going and coming.  
    And God even wants our sins, the things that separate us from Him.  In the Sacrament of Penance, we sacrifice to God the ways that we have said no to God in contrition and with firm amendment to sin no more, and God grants us forgiveness and strengthens our soul to fight temptation in the future.  There is nothing that we have that God does not want to take from us, bless, and then return to us as an opportunity of grace.  May this Lenten season help us to offer the acceptable sacrifice of hearts humble and contrite to God the Father, through Christ the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.