The elevations at today’s 9 am Sung Mass. We welcomed newly ordained deacon the Rev’d Mark Schultz as our preacher at all our Sunday masses. #Episcopal #AngloCatholic #mass #liturgy #church #Eucharist #deacon #priest #NYC #NewYorkCity #UpperWestSide #altar (at Saint Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church)
“Jesus took His flesh from the flesh of Mary.” - #SaintAugustineofHippo
La Adoración Eucarística / ritalaura / #Cathopic #CatholicPriestMedia #Catholic_Priest #Advent2020
“We can say that Mary not only carried the Son of God in her body when he was in her womb, but that she likely carried his cells in her body throughout her life in a way that further magnifies her position as the glorious Theotokos.” ~Some Human Beings Carry Remnants of Other Humans in Their Bodies
“I urge you with all the strength of my soul to approach the Eucharist Table as often as possible. Feed on this Bread of the Angels from which you will draw the strength to fight inner struggles.” - Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati
I wonder if if the Pelosi thing will wake people up to the importance of the Holy Eucharist.
Just from what I’ve seen in the past year; yes, kinda, but not in a good way?
I have seen many Catholics in my personal life rail against the denial of the Eucharist to pro-choice politicians. And, you know, regardless of how you feel on that issue, there are ways of arguing against such actions that are good, and others that are bad.
The argument against it that I’m seeing primarily among lay people is… not so great. I am actually disturbed by the number of people who are claiming the Church does not have the authority to withhold the Eucharist, the recieving of which is apparently a rightgiven to all Catholics. Which is… awful. It’s a historically illiterate argument, for starters, but it’s also an enthronement of the self at the cost of the relational aspect of the Eucharist; it’s an objectification, a commodification, of the Eucharist.
I would be more comfortable if people who were against this denial of the Eucharist were arguing that perhaps the bishops are abusingtheir power in this case; but the fact that I see so many people arguing as if everyone is entitled to the Eucharist is… disheartening.
“In the lives of many women, particularly those, like Lutgard, who had experienced physical (especially sexual) brutality, the touch of Christ’s body came as a healing experience to replace all other touching, which was abhorrent.”
Liturgy, that is to say, the right worship of God that is pleasing to God is given to us, revealed to God’s people by God himself. Scripture, therefore, details the myriad and meticulous ways in which God directs the people of Israel to worship him, and indeed, it should not be forgotten that the reason God delivered the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt was in order that they might go to Mount Sinai and worship him there, in accordance with God’s directions and commands given to the people through Moses.
And yet, as we know, the people rebelled and instead they worshipped a golden calf, that is to say they worshipped something of their own human making. It might be argued that by using the gold they had brought they were offering their very best to the Deity. And yet, Scripture makes it clear that worship that is not revealed by God, worship that is not in accordance with God’s commands, Liturgy that is not given by God is, ultimately, displeasing to God. Hence, in today’s reading from the 1st book of Kings, we are reminded again of this when a king in the Northern Kingdom of Israel presumes to fashion the worship of God according to his own designs. So, again, golden calves are made; priests are appointed by the king, and so, again, God is displeased. Indeed, as Scripture states plainly: “Such conduct made the House of Jeroboam a sinful House, and caused its ruin and extinction from the face of the earth.”
And so this given-ness of the sacred Liturgy, the solemn and proper worship of God, continues into the New Testament and into the worship of Christ’s holy Church. For in today’s Gospel, we have the simplest basic form of the Eucharist in which we discern the four-fold shape of the Mass: Christ who is the Great High Priest and the principal Actor at every Mass takes that which we bring; Christ gives thanks and blesses these gifts; Christ breaks the bread; and Christ gives them to be distributed and received.
What we bring to the Mass, to this Liturgy that is given to us, is our all. Everything that we have to offer, our whole livelihood and our whole selves, is to be offered and handed over to Christ. This, again, is what we see in today’s Gospel as represented by the seven loaves. And all that we offer to the Lord, our whole selves, he will take, bless, break, and distribute so that we, in turn, as a Christian people, shall become bread for others, a leaven for the world. So the Liturgy forms us and teaches us through the grace and example of Christ in order that we might become like him: an oblation of love pleasing to God, a living sacrifice that is given for the life of the world; we give of ourselves in love so that others might have a greater abundance of life in Christ.
This oblation of ourselves, this humble offering to God of all that we have requires of us a certain mortification: we die to ourselves by dying to our own desires and preferences and likes. Instead we give way to the Liturgy as it is given to us by the Church, and so we learn to sing her ancient song, to have her words on our lips and in our prayers, and to read those sacred texts handed down to us. Thus St Paul says concerning the Eucharist that “I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you”. The role of the apostles, the bishop, the priest is to serve the Liturgy given to us, faithfully handing on that which we have received from the Lord. Hence the Second Vatican Council warned that “Regulation of the sacred liturgy depends solely on the authority of the Church… Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority.” (cf Sacrosanctum Concilium, 22)
As such, it is an act of holy obedience, and an act of justice for a priest to celebrate the Liturgy faithfully and carefully in accordance with the liturgical forms that the Church has handed down from time immemorial to this day. Moreover it is an act of love for God’s people, a most pastoral act for the priest and pastor of souls to celebrate the Liturgy worthily and well, following the norms and instructions and texts given by the Church. For if the man-made worship created by Jeroboam called down God’s displeasure upon his house, then, conversely, if a community is mindful to worship God lovingly and humbly, turned towards him and his desire and will, as expressed in the Liturgy that has been given by him, then we can be confident of offering God a sacrifice of thanksgiving that pleases God, and calls down his blessings and mercy.
Therefore Benedict XVI said: “The liturgy derives its greatness from what it is, not from what we make of it. Our participation is, of course, necessary, but as a means of inserting ourselves humbly into the spirit of the liturgy, and of serving Him Who is the true subject of the liturgy: Jesus Christ. The liturgy is not an expression of the consciousness of a community which, in any case, is diffuse and changing. It is revelation received in faith and prayer, and its measure is consequently the faith of the Church, in which revelation is received.”
So, like the crowd in the Gospel who were fed and went away satisfied, we too are fed at the Liturgical tables of the Word and of the Sacrament so that we can go out into the mission fields of the world, fully satisfied if we have first received from the fullness of Christ present in his Church’s sacred Liturgy. Anything less, such as worship that is merely of our own preference and invention and limited human ways, would leave us hungry and thus always wanting for more, and looking elsewhere for spiritual nourishment!
“Why are you so frightened? How is it that you have no faith?” These words of Our Lord haunt us. How is it that we have no faith.
There have probably been many moments when we have felt frightened and alone, when the stormy challenges of life cause the tiny flame of faith to gutter and flicker perilously; and we can be sure that sudden gusts of wind will arise and threaten to extinguish what faith we have.
But we must also recall those wise words of St John Henry Newman: “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt”. Thus Newman, although beset throughout his life by uncertainties and fears and difficulties, also learnt that faith is often the gift of having just enough light to make one step forward on life’s journey towards the safe harbour. So he wrote: “Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th'encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home, Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me.”
Often, the issue is not that we don’t have faith, but rather that we are too much afraid because we cannot see as far ahead as we would like. For we would like to see ahead, to know what is to come, to foreknow the future, so that we can plan ahead, and so trust in our own ingenuity and resources. But faith, such as Jesus speaks of in the Gospel, is learning to trust in the One who will not and has not abandoned us, even if he seems to be asleep. Faith is trusting that God knows the way forward, and he sees the distant scene and he knows the route to the safe haven. Faith is allowing him to lead us, one step at a time.
St John Henry Newman, therefore, had to learn to trust that Christ would lead him forward with the kindly, gentle, and maybe small light of faith. So Newman writes: “I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou Shouldst lead me on; I loved to choose and see my path; but now Lead Thou me on!”
What led St John Henry Newman to this conversion, this deeper trust in God? It was a living encounter with Christ, a profound knowledge of the Word of God, and an experience of God’s love coming from the Sacraments, above all, the Blessed Sacrament. So in the 1830s, Newman writes in a letter to a Catholic friend that at first he didn’t understand what the Mass was about, nor did he notice the flickering light of the Tabernacle lamp that burns there as a symbol of faith in the Real Presence. But later, he says, “after tasting of the [awesome] delight of worshipping God in His Temple, how unspeakably cold is the idea of a Temple without that Divine Presence!“ For he had tasted the love of God present in the Eucharist. Newman marvelled that God was present for us in the Tabernacle, lovingly awaiting us, seemingly asleep, as it were, but always actively present for us. This moved him to know the love of God made visible in Christ. Hence he wrote: “To know that He is close by – to be able again and again through the day to go in to Him” is “such an incomparable blessing.”
Hence the Holy Father reminded us in his first encyclical Lumen Fidei that “Faith is born of an encounter with the living God who calls us and reveals his love, a love which precedes us and upon which we can lean for security and for building our lives.” May we encounter Christ in the Eucharist, He who is the “true Body” born of the Virgin Mary. And may Mary, whose faith burns like a star in the darkness, lead us homewards to God. For as St Thomas Aquinas said: “As mariners are guided into port by the shining of a star, so Christians are guided to heaven by Mary.”
Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea. Echoing the centurion of today’s Gospel we say these words three times before Holy Communion: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof: but only speak the word, and my soul shall be healed.” (Mt 8:8) The repetition of this sentence three times implies that the prayer is addressed to the Holy Trinity who is addressed as Lord, Domine,Kyriein the original Greek text of St Matthew’s Gospel. For it is the Holy Trinity who is invoked in this work of healing the soul, of restoring us to full health, salus, salvation. For salvation comes to us when the Blessed Trinity comes to dwell under our roof, to dwell in us through charity. In the Holy Mass, therefore, the prayer of the centurion is perfected and fully realised, even more powerfully then through the miracle recounted in today’s Gospel. For in the Holy Mass, through the miracle of the Eucharist given to us in Holy Communion, God himself enters in to unite us to himself, the Blessed Trinity. Thus St Augustine heard the Lord say to him: “I am the food of strong men; grow and you shall feed on me; nor shall you change me, like the food of your flesh into yourself, but you shall be changed into my likeness”.
I wish to highlight in particular two aspects of these words to St Augustine. Firstly, there is mention of growth so that we can feed on the Lord. The implication is that as we grow in faith, in fidelity to Christ and his commandments, in Christian maturity, then we shall feed better on the Lord. And secondly the result is that we shall be changed into Christ, and this is something gradual, interior, transformative of who I am.
It is important to remember this, lest we think that the Eucharist is magical, that is to say, that it acts and causes our salvation independently of us. For if we look at the centurion’s statement, he says: “sed tantum dic verbo”, but only speak the word. What is this word that the Lord must speak in order to heal our souls? Is it a word of command like a military leader’s? Is it a declarative word like a king’s who thus makes laws? How does the word of Jesus cause the health and salvation of our souls?
A nominalist view would take it that Christ, perhaps through a juridical act, or through an act of will, just saves us by declaring us to be saved. So, Christ gives the word, declares one to be free of sin and righteous in God’s sight, even if one hasn’t repented nor turned from sin, and so it is; one remains passive in this view of salvation. This, sadly, is a common view even among Catholics these days, but it is a classically Lutheran view. As Luther says, God imputes the righteousness of Christ to the sinner, because he is just “covered under the shadow of Christ’s wings” such that his sins are not counted as sins. So, by his word, God just declares a sin to not be sinful any longer. This is nominalism. And it is also wrong. This is not what is meant when we Catholics pray, “just speak the word, and my soul shall be healed.”
So, what is the word that we refer to in this prayer? How is my salvation, the healing of my soul, caused by the Word of God? And how does Christ speak the Word?
St John tells us, as we hear in the Last Gospel after every Mass, that God creates all by his Word, the divine Logos. And so the Word of God is creative, causes things to be, and actuates the good. God’s Word is not nominalist, it doesn’t declare something to be what it is not. God’s Word, after all, is truth and so he can neither deceive nor lie. Rather, God’s Word effects that which it signifies, it causes reality to be. So too do Sacraments, for they are actions of Christ the Logos,the Word of God. Sacraments, therefore, also effect what they signify; they cause our healing and salvation.
Therefore, during the Mass when we pray: “speak the word, and my soul shall be healed” we are referring to the Eucharist, to Holy Communion, by which Christ, the Word made flesh, enters under our roof sacramentally. The divine Word, therefore, is spoken and comes to dwell among us in the Holy Mass, and we receive him into our own bodies that we might be healed of sin, and so saved for eternal life. So when we echo these words of the centurion, let us speak with the faith, trust, and humility of the centurion, a faith which moved the Lord so much in today’s Gospel: “Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” (Mt 8:10) Hence, before we receive the Eucharist, we say these words, Domine non sum dignus and so we make an act of faith: faith in the power of the Sacrament; faith in the power of Christ, the living Word of God to heal us, to save us, to vivify my soul.
Hence the Catechism teaches that “Communion with the flesh of the risen Christ, a flesh ‘given life and giving life through the Holy Spirit,’ preserves, increases, and renews the life of grace received at Baptism. This growth in Christian life needs the nourishment of Eucharistic Communion, the bread for our pilgrimage until the moment of death, when it will be given to us as viaticum.” (CCC 1392)
However, does this Eucharistic Word of God, spoken in the Mass, and entering under our roofs through Holy Communion heal us and save us immediately? It certainly has the grace and power to do so, but it seldom actually does so. It is not our human experience to be instantly changed into Saints just as we do not suddenly grow or age or change. Rather, it is fitting and proper that human beings grow gradually, as St Augustine suggests.
And yet, it is also possible that God’s Word is spoken, that we receive the Eucharist frequently and even daily, but we do not seem to be healed of our sinful addictions and vices. Why might this be? The Catholic theology of grace is that Christ’s righteousness is not imputed to us as Luther imagines it to be, but rather, it is infused. As such, the grace of Christ truly changes us from within. As such, when we speak about receiving the Sacraments and especially the Holy Eucharist we must speak about doing so with worthy and proper dispositions so that we are open to the graces and spiritual power and healing contained in the Sacraments.
The revered Dominican spiritual doctor, Ven. Louis of Granada thus said that “The more excellent the Sacrament, the more it demands good preparation for its reception and purity of intention… the Eucharist demands actual devotion and reverence in the reception of Communion. This devotion cannot be present without attention, and therefore, one should rid his mind of all distractions and fix his mind on God.” Like the centurion, we approach the altar, therefore, with humble faith. As Louis of Granada says: “The first thing required for a worthy Communion is that one recognize, with great humility, that no human efforts will suffice to make this preparation if God does not assist him. As no one can dispose himself for an increase of grace without grace, so no one can prepare for the reception of God but God. Therefore, one should beg Him with humble and burning desires to cleanse and purify the house where He is going to dwell…
Another requisite for a worthy Communion is purity of intention, which means that we should receive Communion for the proper purpose. For the intention of an action is the principal circumstance of a human act; therefore it should be especially considered… The principal and most proper end of the Eucharist is to receive into our souls the spirit of Christ by means of which we are transformed into Him and we live as He lived, with the same charity, humility, patience, obedience, poverty of spirit, mortification of body, and disdain of the world that He manifested…
[And] the third thing required for the reception of Communion is actual devotion [so] we should approach Communion with the greatest humility and reverence and at the same time with the greatest confidence and love, and the greatest hunger and desire for this heavenly bread.”
Do we not see all these qualities in the centurion who approaches the Lord in today’s Gospel? With humility and faith but with confidence and trust in God’s mercy too, he says: Lord, I am not worthy… Therefore, we too approach the Lord, and we are disposed to receive him as we say today: Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea.
Following the Epiphany, that is to say, the revelation of God among us, the lectionary takes us through a series of miracles and marvels and wonders as Christ is shown to do all the things that deities are expected to do: he heals, provides food for the hungry, walks on water and masters the storm. Thus, Jesus reveals himself to be God through a well-established grammar of divine signs and activities. However, the people often are confounded, amazed, and uncertain what to make of these signs. Why? Because the one thing that nobody expected was that God should become Man.
So, when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, God’s Word spoke a grammar and language of divinity that is unfamiliar to Man: The language of love, of charity, of agape, as St John put it in his writings. “God is love” declares the Beloved Disciple, and thus Christianity appropriates the Greek word agape and gives it a uniquely Christian meaning. For the ancient Greeks agape meant just something like affection or high esteem. But because St John uses it to describe the incarnate Word of God, so the meaning of the word changes and takes on a Christological form: agape for us Christians henceforth means sacrificial and unconditional love, the love made visible and embodied in Jesus Christ.
And the most perfect sign of God’s love for us takes place not in Bethlehem, nor in the countryside of Judea, nor on the streets of Jerusalem, but on the hill called Calvary and anticipated in an upper room on Mount Sion. For there Christ became “the sacrifice that takes our sins away”. However today’s Gospel account of the miraculous feeding at Tabgha in Galilee is rich in Eucharistic symbolism, such that the two fish and five loaves came to be used in early Christian art as a symbol of the Mass. For we are meant to make the connection between this feeding and the loving gift of Christ’s own self in the Eucharist. For the Mass is the Sacrament of Christ’s Sacrifice on Calvary.
Once again, this is unexpected perhaps. For, while feasting on divine food is part of the grammar of deity, it was not expected that God should feed us with himself, or that the banquet should become a sign of his Sacrifice of Love. Yet, for Christ, the language of his agapelove finds its most eloquent expression in the Mass, in this, the Sacrament of Charity. Here is the most perfect sign of divine love that is also the cause of love, agape among us Christians. For Sacraments effect what they signify. How, then, does our reception of the Eucharist empower us to love truly? How, in this Sacrament, where we are begotten by God and know God, shall we be formed to love others as Christ does?
Pope Benedict in his beautiful encyclical Deus Caritas Est, says: “The Eucharist draws us into Jesus’ act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving… Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own. Communion draws me out of myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians. We become “one body”, completely joined in a single existence. Love of God and love of neighbour are now truly united: God incarnate draws us all to himself. We can thus understand how agape also became a term for the Eucharist: there God’s own agape comes to us bodily, in order to continue his work in us and through us.” For “[the Lord] encounters us ever anew, in the men and women who reflect his presence, in his word, in the sacraments, and especially in the Eucharist. In the Church’s Liturgy, in her prayer, in the living community of believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive his presence and we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives. He has loved us first and he continues to do so; we too, then, can respond with love. God does not demand of us a feeling which we ourselves are incapable of producing. He loves us, he makes us see and experience his love, and since he has “loved us first”, love can also blossom as a response within us.”
Let us ponder and contemplate this great mystery, especially we who celebrate and receive the Eucharist daily, this beautiful gift of God’s agape love in the Mass that comes to encounter me and change me into himself. And in this new year, to help in this, I would encourage us to read again Pope Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. 16 years after its publication it remains as compelling, insightful and challenging as when I first read it as a novice in Cambridge.
A week ago, on Christmas eve, I sang from the Martyrology, proclaiming that on the twenty-fifth day of December we celebrated “the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.” And even as I sang those words I reflected on the theological precision of this text: that Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, is born not in his divinity for he is eternal, but born “according to the flesh”. As the same text proclaimed: “Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, longing to hallow the world by his most gracious coming, being conceived by the Holy Spirit, and nine months after his conception was born in Bethlehem of Judah as man from the Virgin Mary.” This is what we celebrate at Christmas and throughout these days: the birth of the eternal Son of God in time, born as one of us, “born of a woman, born a subject of the Law”, as St Paul says in his letter to the Galatians.
Being born “according to the flesh”, therefore, so we can say that in the person of Jesus Christ, God shares our human condition in every way but sin. So, being born “according to the flesh”, these words written by Shakespeare about our common human condition can be said of Jesus Christ who was born of a woman, born among the sons of Israel: “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer… If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?” So it is that during Christmastide we marvel at the implications of the Incarnation: that in the person of Jesus Christ God shares our human joys and sorrows; he laughs and cries as we do.
The temptation, though, is to think that all this only applies to the flesh, to the human bodily aspect of Jesus, so to speak, and so it does not apply to his divinity. We speak of Jesus Christ as being “true God and true Man”, but the problem is that the word “and” is used as a conjunction, and so we’re misled into thinking of Christ’s humanity and Christ’s divinity as being merely conjoined and not inextricably and substantially united. So, in the 5th-century Nestorius, the Archbishop of Constantinople, argued that the Bible “speaks of the birth and suffering not of the godhead but of the humanity of Christ, so that the holy virgin is more accurately termed mother of Christ than mother of God.”
But this cannot be because Christ is one unified person, not a split-personality; the human and divine natures are not conjoined in him but are rather, hypostatically or substantially or fundamentally always united in the one person, and not just accidentally as one would take clothing on and off. Christ cannot divest himself of his humanity, but rather, the marvel and scandal and wonder of the Incarnation is that the eternal Word of God has truly and substantially become flesh, born of a woman, born for us men and for our salvation.
Thus St Cyril of Alexandria wrote to Nestorius and said: “we adore one Son and Lord, Jesus Christ. We do notdivide him into parts and separate man and God in him… For, as we have already said, the Word of God was united hypostatically with the flesh and is God of all and Lord of the universe… For the one and only Christ is not dual, even though he be considered to be from two distinct realities, brought together into an unbreakable union. In the same sort of way a human being, though he be composed of soul and body, is considered to be not dual, but rather one out of two. Therefore, in thinking rightly, we refer both the human and divine expressions to the same person… Therefore, because the holy virgin bore in the flesh God who was united hypostatically with the flesh, for that reason we call hermother of God… because, as we have said, [the eternal Word of God] united to himself hypostatically the human and underwent a birth according to the flesh from her womb.”
The theological precision of the Christmas proclamation we heard a week ago, therefore, safeguards the uniqueness of Christ’s person: that Jesus Christ is always both God and Man, divine and human. Likewise today’s Solemn feast day, which has its origin in the Council of Ephesus on 431 when the Church adopted as her own the explanations of St Cyril of Alexandria concerning the unity of Christ’s person as both God and Man, and so declared Mary to be not only Mother of Christ but rather Theotokos, the God-bearer, the Mother of God. Today’s feast, falling on the Octave Day of Christmas, is therefore not a pious Marian insert into the Christmas festivities, but a fitting reminder that everything Mary does and is points to her divine Son; she always magnifies and exalts God her Saviour.
It is in this light that we read today’s Gospel, appropriately on the eighth day after the birth of Jesus, that is to say, on the day of his circumcision according to the flesh, under the prescripts of the Law. The baby born of Mary is named ‘Jesus’, which means “God is salvation”. Now, if Jesus is not fully God in the way that St Cyril and the Councils of the Church understand him to be, then he cannot save us. If Jesus is not hypostatically united as God and Man, then his blood, first shed for us at his circumcision, does not wash away our sins because it is merely the shedding of the blood of Jesus the man, and not Jesus the God-Man.
The doctrine of Christ’s hypostatic union that we celebrate today, therefore, that is expressed in the fact that we call Mary the Mother of God, is crucially important and is not just philosophical nit-picking. Rather, as with all good theology, good philosophical thinking and reasoning matters otherwise we get mired in heresy and confusion. So, St Cyril explains that God is born according to the flesh, born in time and born of a woman “in order that he might bless the beginning of our existence, in order that… the curse [of sin] against the whole race should thereafter cease which was consigning all our earthy bodies to death [and in order that, by Christ’s removal of the curse of sin and death, the words of the prophet might be fulfilled, that] ‘God has wiped every tear away from all face’.” Hence, on the first day of the year, together with Mary the Mother of God, we behold, in the person of Jesus Christ, the face of God; the God who is with us, who is so united to our humanity that he saves and elevates us to heaven, according to the flesh. Let us mull upon this awesome truth, and so let us be consoled and filled with joy this new year.
Finally, as we gather around the Altar now, let us reflect on the words of St Cyril concerning the Holy Eucharist that we receive. This is the living Bread come down from heaven, the hypostatically united God-Man who is born of a woman, born of Mary Mother of God, and who can thus give us true and everlasting life. St Cyril says: “we offer the unbloody worship in the churches and so proceed to the mystical thanksgivings and are sanctified having partaken of the holy fleshand precious blood of Christ, the saviour of us all. This we receive not as ordinary flesh, heaven forbid, nor as that of a man who has been made holy and joined to the Word by union of honour, or who had a divine indwelling, but as truly the life-giving and real flesh of the Word. For being Life by nature as God, when he became [a person] with his own flesh, he made it also to be life-giving” as he told us: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” (Jn 6:53f)
Many of us, I’m sure, are grateful that we live in these technological times in which virtual reality is possible. Thanks to video cameras, and a stable internet bandwidth, we can be physically distanced and yet virtually, spiritually present. Some of you might be watching this Mass on our livestream on YouTube for example, and many of us will have worked from home, participated in Zoom meetings, and attended classes and talks online. And I am grateful for the respite and opportunity these have afforded us. I, for one, am glad I was able to witness via WhatsApp my only niece’s first birthday party, held in North Carolina back in February. Last month, via Zoom, I also preached at my last surviving grandfather’s funeral held in Kuala Lumpur. And like so many of you who may have had to do this kind of thing, I acknowledge that this was better than nothing at all; virtual presence is better than absence.
But all our Zoom meetings and hours online staring at screens can leave us brain-dead, feeling like ‘Zoombies’. And although a virtual birthday party is better than nothing, it just reminds us of how empty or unsatisfying a virtual presence can be, like a hug emoji when you’re down, or a photo of flowers or sunsets on your anniversary, when what you want is to smell, feel, touch, see, and experience the real physical embodied material thing.
So, one thing we can all realise after almost two years of all the above and more, is that we’re not disembodied souls - ghosts. Neither are we dis-ensouled bodies - zombies. We’re not pure spirit like the angels are, nor are we just bodies of flesh, blood, nerves and sinew without transcendent intelligence as mere beasts are. Rather, to be human is to a marvellously unique and complex unit of body and soul: we’re spiritual and capable of great ideas and thoughts and of enjoying beauty and music and books. But at the same time, we hunger and thirst, and feel pain and sickness, pleasure and delight. For such is our human nature, to be both physical and spiritual creatures such that the physical uplifts the spirit, and the spiritual delights the body such as when we appreciate good food with friends and family, or listen to our favourite song, or receive a hug from a beloved granddaughter.
Christmas, therefore, focusses us on the reality and marvel of being human, with all its ups and downs. For at the centre of Christmas is the mystery of the Incarnation, the marvellous (and for some, scandalous and incredible) claim that God became Man, born in Bethlehem in Judaea, born of Mary and swaddled in a manger. The Gospel we’ve just heard attends to all the human elements of this claim, for if we’re talking about the birth of a human being, we immediately place him within a family, a society, and a history, and a cultural context – St Luke fills us in on all these human details. It is these circumstances and the concrete facts of culture, relationships, and material objects like swaddling clothes and a manger, that serve to make the Incarnation real and not just virtual reality.
So, of course, from the start people have made note of these real locations, and been on pilgrimage to these places, and preserved as relics the material objects connected to the birth of Jesus. For this is what human beings do, and one of the things I love about being Catholic is the very human bodily manner in which we relate to Jesus. For, quite rightly, we’re not content with just hearing about the birth of Jesus, nor do we want to just see it through a screen, but rather we want to journey there too. Hence every church has a Nativity scene where we can go, and see and touch and experience the wonder of the coming of God as Man – born as one of us, a human being like us, and thus located in human history and a human place. Indeed, he is to be located now, tonight, in this church, here.
All those years ago the prophet had foretold that there will be “a child born for us”, and then the shepherds were told by angelic messengers: “a Saviour has been born to you”, born foryou. And rightly do we rejoice that Christ has been born to save mankind fallen into sin. And yet, in our excitement over the end result we might miss the marvel of the process: A child has been born forus. And who is this us? Mankind, you and I with our human nature. So God has been born for us human beings, taking on a human nature himself in the person of Jesus Christ. Thus the Offertory carol tonight says: “Then was I born of a virgin pure,/ Of her I took fleshly substance/ Thus was I knit to man’s nature/ To call my true love to my dance.”
This last bit tells us, again, what it means to say that a child has been born forus because the reason that God became Man, the reason that God took on a human nature like ours, was so that he might communicate with us through the bodily and physical ways that we understand well, and the reason he does this is to call us to his dance. And here is the core reason for Christmas and for tonight’s celebration.
Now, arguably, only those who have bodies and who live in time and space can dance. Therefore, when this carol speaks of God’s dance, it is referring to the Incarnation of God, and for us human beings to be called to God’s dance means that we are being called graciously to move in co-ordination with God, to learn to sway in sync with Christ and to follow his lead along the ways of goodness and of love. Anyone who has been watching Strictly Come Dancing knows what happens when the partners in the dance are not attuned to each other! So, to speak of us taking up God’s dance is to speak of our Christian moral lives, and so Christ comes to teach us how to be human.
For the human person is a unity of body and soul such that with his whole being he can freely choose to love. Therefore, Christ comes to show us, by his words and by his teaching and by his actions and example, how to love. In Christ, God comes as our true love to show us how to truly love. As human beings we love not in disembodied ways, not only with our minds, nor only abstractly in our imaginations, nor only through virtual reality – we’ve been forced to do this kind of thing over the past year and a half and we know it doesn’t really satisfy. Neither do we love by only satisfying our bodily desires and pleasures, for to only pay attention to the bodily or only to the spiritual would be incomplete, inhuman, and therefore sinful. Rather, we must love as human beings, which means we love with our whole beings, body and soul, with all the joys and fears and sorrows and pains and music and art and food and amazement and wonder that comes with our full human experience. Therefore Jesus said: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” and “love your neighbour as yourself.”
Therefore, when God becomes Man, he is born into a family, a society, a culture because it is likewise in our families, our communities, our parishes, our homes that we shall exercise love and learn to love well as Jesus does. Christ worked and toiled; he knew the oppression of governments, and the humiliations and injustices done by others; and he knew the sorrow of missing a friend, a father who has died. But he also laughed, and joked, and enjoyed delicious feasts and the smell of perfumed nard, and the company of friends and the comfort of his dear mother. Through all these genuinely human contexts, Christ exercised love, and so it is for us too. Through our ordinary and daily human circumstances, the joys and sorrows of being human, we have been called to become like Christ, to be moved by his grace so that we are attuned to the rhythm of the divine dance, doing ordinary things with true love so that we shall become like God who is Love, Incarnate. So St Athanasius sums up the core message of Christmas, the great central mystery of the Incarnation: “God became Man so that Man might become God”.
The mistake many make is to think that this should happen abstractly, merely spiritually, or mentally. The mistake is to think that religion is disembodied or that it denigrates the human body, or suppresses the world’s authentic pleasures and freedoms, or that it is only about what I believe but not what I do. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to Christianity. For ours is a bodily incarnational faith so, as Tertullian says, “the flesh is the hinge of salvation.” If so, then the great marvel of the Incarnation is that our God becomes Man in each one of us, he desires to be really present in each of us, whom he calls his “true love”. So, in each of us, in our bodies and in our lives, Christ comes to be born again and to take flesh in each of us through his gift of grace. So St John of the Cross said that “each of us is the midwife of God”. And God knows that a virtual presence is not sufficient for us, so he comes to us in a spiritual-material way, really present for us here and now in the Holy Mass; he comes tonight in the Eucharist to dwell in us. So, let us offer the Christ Child the hospitality of our hearts and of our homes.
For as the Servant of God Dorothy Day reflected: “I am so glad that Jesus was born in a stable. Because my soul is so much like a stable. It is so poor and in unsatisfactory condition because of guilt, falsehoods, inadequacies and sin. Yet, I believe if Jesus can be born in a stable, maybe he can also be born in me.” Indeed, so let us rejoice. For today a Saviour has been born to us, for us, in us: he is Christ the Lord!
“Drop down dew from above, you heavens”. For many, these words from Isaiah, Rorate caeli desuper, which began our Entrance antiphon tonight, are one of the key phrases of the Advent season. In the Second Eucharistic Prayer we say: “Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall”, and so the dew that is mentioned by Isaiah is likewise a reference to the descent of the Holy Spirit, to God’s grace falling from the heavens to soften the hardness of our hearts, and to bring refreshment and joy to our lives, just as dew upon the grass softens the cold earth and glitters beautifully in the morning sunlight.
Isaiah goes on: Having called down the Holy Spirit to descend like dew from the heavens, he says, “let the clouds rain down the Just One; let the earth be opened and bring forth a Saviour.” So, in the Holy Mass the Holy Spirit descends on the bread and wine, the fruit of the earth, and these become the Body and Blood of Christ the Saviour. The earth, therefore, is opened and brings forth a Saviour.
However, these words of the prophet aren’t principally about the Mass, but rather, first of all, about the Incarnation of Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit coming down from heaven, God’s grace which is unseen but vivifying like the dew, saturates the earth of the Virgin Mary’s and makes her fruitful, so that her womb opens and brings forth the Saviour, Jesus Christ. People sometimes think that Christmas is the feast of the Incarnation, but of course this isn’t quite accurate. The Incarnation, the moment when Mary conceives by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, is more properly celebrated liturgically on the 25th of March. We tend to call that date the feast of the Annunciation but it can more accurately be called the feast of the Incarnation, and each time we pray the Angelus (as we do every evening before this Mass) we recall the moment of the Incarnation when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”.
But where did the Incarnation take place? Most people will say, in accordance with Scripture, in Nazareth, and indeed if we go to Nazareth we will find a great church built around the site of Mary’s house, the place where the Annunciation happened, along with a marble slab incised with these words: “Here the Word became flesh.” However, when I visited Nazareth, I was disappointed to find that only the foundations of this house and a few stones remained there. Likewise in 1061, following a vision, Richeldis had a copy of the Holy House of Nazareth built in Walsingham. But even there, nothing remains but the foundations. Where did the Holy House go? In the 13th-century, a noble family of Crusaders called the Angel family had the Holy House moved, stone by stone, to Italy for safekeeping. Because at that time the Holy Land was being conquered by Muslim armies who had been destroying the Christian shrines.
Today’s feast, therefore, which was extended to the whole Church by Pope Francis, is a commemoration of the Holy House of Mary which is now enshrined in Loreto, Italy. However, as the Collect of the Mass makes clear, we’re not commemorating a building but the great response of Mary who lived in that house: her humility was pleasing to God and her obedience was profitable for us, for it gained for us the Saviour. Indeed, through her Fiat, Mary herself became the Holy House within whom God dwelt for nine months. It is the manifestation of the Incarnate Word to the whole world, his birth and his glorious epiphanies that we will celebrate at Christmastide.
However, the greatest marvel of all is that this same Word becomes flesh here as well. For this same Saviour wills to become our food and drink in the Mass as, by the action of the same Holy Spirit descending upon the bread and wine on the altar, Christ becomes present – body, blood, soul, and divinity – in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, given to us so that we might each be opened to receive the Just One, the Saviour, God-with-us. Let us have the humility of Mary and follow her obedience to the Word so that God’s grace will open us up to become fruitful in works of goodness and justice and truth. Thus shall we Christians also be said to bring forth the Just One for our world today that stands ever more in need of his salvation.
12 March: the Feast of St Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome from 3 September 590 to his death.
The Mass of St Gregory is a favourite depiction in Christian art.
Tradition has it that, once when celebrating Mass, a woman smiled when receiving Communion. Questioned, she laughed at Gregory’s reverence for the host, insisting that it was nothing more than bread she had baked that day. Legend holds the host then appeared as a finger. Subsequently, tradition asserted that the image of Jesus as the “Man of Sorrows” appeared on the altar during the Mass.
