Celebrating Birthdays

Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist

In our own times, birthdays are big deals.  Everybody I know celebrates birthdays, or avoids their celebration because they don’t want to be reminded that they’re going older.  Some people celebrate half birthdays (another excuse to party, I suppose), and some priests I know joke about celebrating an octave (8 consecutive days) of the day of their birth, just like we do for Jesus in the Octave of Christmas.

But for the Church, we generally celebrate the day a person died.  We don’t do this because we’re morbid, but because, especially as the Church first started celebrating holy men and women, we were celebrating martyrs, those who died for the faith.  So the date of their death was actually the date of their victory through Christ, the day they were born to eternal life; we might call it their heavenly birthday.  So today’s celebration, which supersedes a Sunday celebration, something not all that common, means something pretty big.  There are really only three birthdays that the Church celebrates: the Nativity of the Lord on 25 December, which is one of the holiest days of the year, after Easter; the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 8 September, which, when it falls on a Sunday, is not celebrated; and the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, which is one of the handful of days in the Church’s calendar that has different readings for the vigil, the night before, than for the day.

Birthplace of St. John the Baptist
in En Kerem

And St. John the Baptist, the Precursor, as he is also called, is a pretty big deal.  He’s not as holy as the Blessed Virgin Mary, but he prepares the way for the Lord.  He plows the ground, as it were, so that the seed of faith that Jesus plants, can grow in the hearts of the men and women of his time.

John is known as being, what we would call a radical: he wears camel hair and eats locusts and honey.  He lives near the Jordan River, in a mainly uninhabited place, and tells everybody that they’re sinners, in need of repentance.  He calls out King Herod for his unlawful marriage to his brother’s wife, and St. John loses his head for it.  But the word radical does not really mean extreme.  Radical comes from the Latin word radix, which means root.  Our English word radish is simply a transliteration of the Latin word, which, in another form can be radice.  Not a very inventive word for not a very special root that we eat.  But John goes to the root of following Jesus: proclaiming repentance in preparation for Jesus.

In the Gospel on Saturday we hear about how John’s conception is achieved miraculously, but without faith from his father, Zechariah, believing it could happen, and so he is struck mute by the Archangel Gabriel.  And in the Gospel on Sunday, we hear about the naming of John, which frees Zechariah’s tongue and allows him to proclaim God’s wonders again.  But in both the first readings, we hear about being a prophet, speaking God’s Word to the people, which is exactly the mission of St. John the Baptist.

And that is exactly the mission of all of us: to proclaim God’s Word.  And that Word is not so much a particular teaching (though we can teach others about what God says), but a Person, the eternal Word of God that St. John the Apostle and Evangelist talks about, the Word that was in the beginning, the Word that was with God and is God.  We, like Jeremiah, like Isaiah, like St. John the Baptist, are called to prepare the way of the Lord, to make straight His paths.  

But, you might say, if you’re paying attention and not reading your bulletin, Jesus has already come!  We don’t need to prepare for Him, any more than we need to prepare for the Belgium vs. Panama World Cup Soccer game, because it’s already come.  But, in fact, Jesus’ coming happens daily to each person.  Each day Jesus wants to enter our hearts.  But in order to do that, we have to be prepared for him, and in order to be prepared, someone has to help us prepare, and that’s where we come in.  Each day we are called to help people see Jesus in what we say and in what we do: in the kind word to a person who is having a rough day; in the challenging word that we speak with love to a person who is not living as Jesus teaches us; in serving people in the food pantry.  But we have to be purposeful about it, about making it about Jesus.  When the person asks us why we are being kind to them, or why we are lovingly challenging them, or why we are serving them, we need to witness to Jesus and say it’s because Jesus loves them, and as followers of Jesus so do we.  It’s not enough to hope that they’ll catch on.

Imagine if John had been calling people to repentance, but then when Jesus came by, not said, “Behold the Lamb of God!”  He would not have completed his mission.  If, when John was baptizing and being asked why, John said, “I don’t really feel comfortable talking about it,” instead of, “One is coming after me who will baptize you with fire!”, maybe we wouldn’t be celebrating the Nativity of St. John the Baptist.  But we are.  And that in itself is a challenge to us to be like John, to prepare the way of the Lord, to help Jesus find a welcome home by our participation in the mission to proclaim the Word of God, the eternal Word of God, Jesus Christ in our daily words and actions.  

Be radical!  Embrace your mission!  Prepare the way for the Lord!

Immersed in the Mass

Third Sunday of Lent

German World Cup Athlete

If I were to try to explain the rules of soccer to someone who didn’t play, soccer would likely sound like one of the most boring and complicated sports in the world.  It would sound something like: the point of the game is to get the ball into the opponent’s goal; but you have to use your feet to get the ball there; or you can use your head; if you use your hands it’s a penalty, unless you’re a goalie within the goal box, or unless  you’re throwing the ball in from out of bounds; but if you throw the ball in then both feet have to be on the ground and the ball has to go completely over your heard; but if the ball goes out on the goal line but not in the net, if it was last touched by the offense it’s a goal kick, which means that the ball is placed on the ground and kicked; if it was last touched by the defense it’s a corner kick, which means that the ball is placed on the ground at the corner flag.  And I won’t even get into the offsides rules that confuse so many people!

It sounds like a lot of rules that may or may not make sense.  But when you see a professional athlete play soccer, see how all the rules work together to allow two teams to try to win, and see how the rules allow play to continue without favoring one side or another, the beauty of soccer comes through.  The rules of the system allow the activity to continue in a way that beauty is conveyed.  How often do we speak about the way an athlete plays as poetry in motion!

Jesus, in the Gospel, is crying foul (or blowing His whistle for a penalty) with the merchants and moneychangers in the temple.  It’s easy to gloss over why Jesus gets so upset.  We can quickly jump to conclusions about why Jesus throws out the moneychangers and merchants.  After all, why would there be a mini-bank in the temple?  And the merchants were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and those things smell, are messy, and, if they’ve eaten recently, tend to leave little presents that need to be cleaned up.  But the moneychangers were helping Jews from across the world exchange their money so they could pay the temple tax in the accepted shekels.  They were like super ushers who would exchange money for you for the collection.  And the merchants were really just religious goods salesmen, as those animals were only used for one thing: sacrifice.  And yet Jesus casts them out!  Why?  Because they were not allowing the beauty of the temple and of temple worship to shine through.

We have a lot of rules when it comes to Mass: don’t eat or drink anything besides water and medicine 1 hour before you receive Holy Communion; stand at this time, sit at this time, kneel at this time; the priest and deacon have certain words that they need to say, and can rarely ad lib; all vessels must be made of precious metal which hold the Body or Blood of Jesus; not every song that we like can be sung; and the list goes on.  These rules are meant to communicate the beauty which the Mass is meant to show, namely, the truth of Jesus’ perfect sacrifice on the cross and our participation in the Paschal Mystery.  The less we know about the reasons for the rules, the more they seem capricious or willy-nilly, just like the rules of soccer seem strange to those who are not immersed in the beauty of the game.  But, when we familiarize ourselves with what the Mass is supposed to be, the worship of rational beings to God, joined to the perfect worship of Jesus on the altar of the cross, it’s like watching professional athletes play World Cup soccer: the rules don’t seem as clunky, and, in fact, they allow each individual to use their talents in a more profound way.  

I invite you, if you don’t understand what goes on in the Mass, to read, attend adult faith formation sessions, and learn more about what occurs when the Mass is celebrated.  The more we do, the more we will see the beauty of the Mass as facilitated by the rules, rather than just a bunch of rules that don’t let us do what we want to in the Mass.