The Last Gospel

Nativity of the Lord: Mass during the Day/Third Mass
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  There are so many beautiful images that the Scriptures bring to our imaginations about the Nativity of the Lord.  Maybe we think of Joseph leading Mary on a donkey as she travels to Bethlehem while being nine months pregnant.  Or maybe we think of them going up to inns, trying to see if there’s room, but not finding anything.  Because of St. Francis of Assisi, we may think of them in a barn-like structure, though the older tradition is that our Lord was born in a cave.  We may think of the shepherds seeing the angels, hearing them sing the Gloria, and then going to find the Christ Child.  Based upon the Christmas carol, we might even think about a little boy with his snare drum playing for the Holy Family (which is probably not what a woman who has just given birth wants to hear).    So which of these accounts do we hear as we come to Mass today on Christmas morning/afternoon?  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was God….And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.”  And yet, according to one scholar, John’s prologue was the traditional Gospel for Christmas Day from the time of the earliest lectionaries, or collections of readings for the Mass. 
    So why this Gospel?  Why this elevated reflection Christ as the Logos, the Word?  This prologue is really the Gospel writ small.  It precedes, in a sense, Genesis, and concludes, in a sense the Book of Revelation.  It starts at the beginning, but even before “In the beginning” from Genesis, because it speaks of the time when there was simply God, and nothing else.  It talks about the perennial back and forth between light and darkness, an unequal battle that entered humanity’s realm by the disobedience of Adam and Eve.  But it also talks about those who belong to God, are enabled to become His children, through this same Logos, this same Word, Jesus Christ.
    All of the stories with which we are familiar–Mary and Joseph, the inns, the stable or cave, the shepherds–John encapsulates in the pithy phrase, “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”  John, who wrote this Gospel around the year AD 90, already had the witness of Matthew and Luke giving their own infancy narratives.  But there is more to Christmas than just a baby.  There is also the aspect that this baby brought us the grace to be freed from the slavery to the law.  Christ gave us more than just a new law.  He gave us Himself: “From his fullness…grace in place of grace.”  And John, even in just this first part of the first chapter, is able to start to tease out the invisible realities which this visible baby brought forth.
    Other than today and on Holy Thursday, in the Extraordinary Form, this Gospel passage is read at the end of each Mass and is called the Last Gospel.  This practice began in England in what is called the Sarum Rite from the twelfth century.  Between the eleven hundreds and the fifteen hundreds, it was a private prayer for the priest to say after Mass.  Pope St. Pius V added it to every Mass (with few exceptions) in 1570.  It was eliminated in the post-Conciliar changes to the Missal in 1965.
    But the value is that, at the end of each Mass in the Extraordinary Form, priest and people are reminded of this overarching theme of salvation: God in Himself; God in the Incarnation; God’s grace and truth given to us to become children of God, a revelation only made possible by the Incarnation of the Eternal Word.  And the Eucharist, just received at the time of the Last Gospel, is precisely the same Word, who strengthens the individual Catholic in the Theo-drama of God’s victory of light over darkness and holiness over sin. 
    This focus on the divinity of Christ also reminds us of the power of Christmas over all the other ways that God communicated.  The Letter to the Hebrews adeptly reminds us that God has spoken to us in partial and various ways.  He walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening.  He spoke to Noah and commanded him to build an ark to save the righteous.  He called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees.  He called Moses to free His people from bondage in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land.  He anointed David to be the king and shepherd of His people, Israel.  He gave Solomon the plan for the Temple and dwelt there.  He sent prophets to remind the people of their commitment to follow God and the consequences if they did not.  And all of those were good.
    But at that first Christmas, God chose to speak for Himself.  An ambassador is a good communication of the wishes and expectations of a ruler.  But the ruler himself communicates in a way that far surpasses a spokesman.  A picture or a painting can capture some of the beauty of a landscape.  But to be in the presence of the reality far surpasses any representation of that beauty.  Our Lord is the ruler.  Our Lord is the beautiful landscape.  And in encountering Him, in the Incarnation, we have the chance to appreciate the reality beyond the shadows the prefigured it. 
    This may not be the Christmas Gospel we anticipate.  But it’s the Christmas Gospel that explains not just that day, but all of salvation history.  This Prologue reminds us that Christmas is not just about the baby that we see with our eyes, but the God that we see with our faith.  May our appreciation of the Word made Flesh, spur us on to live in the grace and truth that come from Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit are one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

More Enduring than a Maytag

Last Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  I don’t feel that I’m that old, but more and more the cultural things that seem part and parcel of my life are more and more disconnected from the youth today.  For example, I remember the Maytag commercials, with the Maytag repairman sitting in his office, waiting for the phone to ring.  For me, when I think of things that last and that don’t break down, I think of the Maytag man.  I’m not sure young people today would even know who the Maytag man is.

    Our Lord today focuses on a lot of things that will happen at the end, or as the end approaches.  There are things that will come, and things that will go.  There will be great trials and tribulations.  False messiahs and false prophets will arise and do great wonders.  “The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars will fall from heaven.”  Then the angels will accompany the coming of the Son of Man, with a trumpet and a loud voice.  These are the things from which itinerant and television preachers make a lot of money and gain lots of fame.  They are all sure that they know that the end is coming very soon, even though our Lord Himself says that only the Father knows the time, not the angels nor even the Son. 
    But the last words of the Gospel today remind us, that while things will come and go as the end approaches (and the end is approaching; it’s closer today than it was yesterday), there is one thing that will not change.  “Heaven and earth shall pass away,” Christ says, “but my words shall not pass away.” 
    The word of God is enduing; it lasts forever.  It does not come and go based on empires and nations, based upon fads and societal norms.  It endures forever.  And if we wish to survive whatever trials and tribulations will come, whenever they come (which they will), we need to be grounded in the Word of God, which is the rock foundation upon which our house should be built if we don’t want it to be swept away with the floods.
    When Catholics use the phrase “Word of God,” we can use it in different ways.  We use it to describe the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus Christ.  He is the Word through whom all things were made, the eternal Word of God, whom we profess every time we say the Prologue of the Gospel of John.  Christ is the expression of the Father who reveals to us who the Father is.  He is the Divine Word who speaks words that help us know the way to the Father, which is the desired destiny for all those whom God has created in His image and likeness.  So when we talk abut the Word of God, we use that phrase par excellence to refer to Christ.
    We can also use it to refer to the words of writing that were inspired by the Word of God.  We speak of the Word of God as the Scriptures, the privileged communication of God throughout the centuries.  Most religions are humanity seeking after God.  In Judaism, and its fulfillment in Catholicism, God seeks after us, and communicates who He is, how He made the world, and how we are to find true and lasting happiness.  While we are described by Muslims as people of the book, we are really people of the Word, who treasure what God has revealed to us in the Scriptures.  The public revelation of God through the Scriptures leads up in the Old Testament to the coming of the Messiah in the Gospels, and then opens up the consequences of what the Messiah did for us through the rest of the New Testament.  We find a sure guide in the Scriptures of understanding God and knowing how we are to live as disciples of Christ.
    But the Scriptures need unpacking to help us understand which parts are to be taken literally, and which parts are different literary expressions of deeper truths.  Sometimes the same grammatical structures express two different types of truth.  For example, in the Gospel according to John, our Lord says that He is the Bread of Life.  And that is what we believe He is, especially in our understanding of the Eucharist.  We take that quite literally.  In another place, Christ says that He is the vine, and we are the branches.  But we don’t confess our Savior to be a plant.  Same grammatical structure, different interpretation.  And so the Word of God can also mean the authentically and authoritative interpretations of Scripture that we find in the teachings of the Church.  From the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, God’s word is also made manifest when the Mystical Body of Christ the Word, also known as the Church, teaches something as necessary for true faith or morals.  Official Church teachings are also God communicating to us for our salvation, and are sure guides to being the disciples and saints that God calls us to be in baptism.  Ecumenical Councils, and magisterial teachings of the Pope and the Bishops continue to open up the Word of God and help us to know who God is in Himself and in His works. 
    The Word of God does not change, and we can safely build our houses on it, really, on Him, since Christ is the Word of God.  We don’t have to know exactly when the Son of Man will return.  But we do need to be attentive to the Son of Man and what He revealed to us.  And if we do, then we will be part of the elect who will survive the trials and tribulations that the Savior mentions in the Gospel.  If we build our life on the Word of God–Jesus Christ, the Scriptures, and the official teachings of the Church–then the end is not a fearful time, but the consummation of our Lord’s love for us and our love for the Lord.  If we build our life on the Word of God, and do our best to follow it each and every day, then it doesn’t matter when that great and glorious and terrible day of our Lord’s return is, because we are ready each day for Him to come back and take us to Himself. 
    Maytags were advertised as washing machines that were so reliable, that their repairmen had nothing to do.  But even more as something that lasts is the Word of God, which is the same yesterday, today, and forever, because the Word of God is Christ the Son, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign forever and ever.  Amen.  

What Good is the Word?

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time–Sunday of the Word of God

    This year, Pope Francis has inaugurated a new focus for this third Sunday of Ordinary Time.  He has decreed that the third Sunday of Ordinary Time is especially to be centered on the Word of God.  In his Apostolic Letter that created this celebration, Pope Francis writes, “without the Scriptures, the events of the mission of Jesus and of his Church in this world would remain incomprehensible.  Hence, Saint Jerome could rightly claim: ‘Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.’”
    For Catholics, especially of a particular age, the Scriptures may be a bit foreign.  Indeed, some of you have even told me that, while growing up, you were discouraged by priests, nuns, and others, from reading the Word of God.  While we do have some active Bible study groups here, some of you may be thinking: what good would it do me to read the Bible more?  I’ve gotten along without it just fine for this long!
    The Word of God, as divinely revealed in Sacred Scripture, and faithfully communicated and interpreted through the teaching of the Church, is meant to be the guide for our life.  In the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, entitled Dei Verbum, of the Second Vatican Council, the Church teaches:

both [sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture], flowing from the same divine wellspring…merge into a unity and tend toward the same end.  For Sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit, while sacred tradition takes the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, and hands it on to their successors in its full purity, so that led by the light of the Spirit of truth, they may in proclaiming it preserve the word of God faithfully, explain it, and make it more widely known. […] Therefore both sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence.

When we sang, with the Psalmist, “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” what we were saying is that the Lord illuminates the path that I am to take towards heaven.  The Word of God gives us a great light, whereas without it we walk in darkness.  It brings us “abundant joy and great rejoicing.”  It gives us freedom from the yoke of sin that burdens us.
    The Word of God is also meant to bring about the unity of Jesus’ followers, and all those who are created in the image and likeness of God.  Humanity tends towards disunity; it is, we might say, the communal law of entropy.  Even in St. Paul’s time, he writes that divisions are creeping in among the Christians of Corinth: “each of you is saying, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’”  When we are left to our own machinations, we tend to divide.  The Word of God, given to us through Sacred Scripture and faithfully interpreted by the teaching office of the Church, holds together what Satan wants to sift apart.
    Lastly, as we hear from our Gospel today, the Word of God calls us on to mission.  Jesus, the eternal Word (in Greek: Logos) of God the Father, calls the first apostles, Simon and Andrew, and also James and John, and invites them to follow Him, so that He might make them “fishers of men.”  It’s not as if the Word of God is meant to stay stagnant in our lives.  It is meant to change us, and to urge us on to making other disciples.  If our engagement with the Word of God doesn’t draw us to make other disciples, then we’re not getting all that God wants to share with us through His Word.
    Now, I know, those are a lot of high-level ideals.  But does the Word of God make a difference in my real life?  It can, if we are open to its effects.  In the first way, it helps us to make decisions on how we spend our time and money, helps us to know how to interact with others, and assists us in making both big life decisions and the smaller daily decisions by shining the light of Christ on the path we are seeking to travel, to see if it’s a good path or a dangerous path.
    In the second case, there are a lot of people who claim to follow Jesus, but the Word of God can help us evaluate whether their encouragements of what to believe and how to live are truly from God and live up to His wisdom, as expressed in Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Church.  Both are necessary, as we see Christian communities who were historically founded on the Scriptures as the only rule of faith, now allowing and sometimes even promoting activities which are in direct contradiction to the Sacred Scripture.  We avoid division by staying faithful to the Word of God as expressed in the Bible and faithfully interpreted by the apostles and their successors, the bishops, teaching in union with the Pope. 
    In the third case, the more that we hear the Good News expressed in the Word of God–that God loves us, God has a plan for us, God forgives us, God has saved and is saving us–the more we want others to hear that news.  Bible studies cannot be ends in themselves, but should push us to share with our family and friends and neighbors that Good News, and how following God can change our lives for the better. 
    Today God reminds us that His Word is light, unity, and mission.  May our hearing of the Word of God, and our daily engagement with it, bring that light, unity, and mission to our lives, that we may share that light, unity, and mission with those that we encounter each day.