Liturgy, Identity & Mission: On Our Patronal Feast

When we encounter someone new, it’s natural to want to know more about them. Where do they come from? What are they about? What do they value? In what ways are they similar to us; in what ways different?

For example, when someone first visits our church, they probably look for certain clues about our identity. They might see the name of our parish on the church exterior, or check out the Mass times on the sign out front. They might read about details of our parish life in our bulletin or on our website. Most importantly, though, they come to understand who we are by encountering us, individually, but especially as a community, which usually means here at Mass. In the Catholic view of things, we are most truly ourselves when we are gathered around the Sacrifice of the Altar, since our most fundamental identity is the Body of Christ, united in praise to our Heavenly Father. 

Helio Wernegreen, The Institution of the Eucharist (c. 1950)

Today, we celebrate our parish’s patronal feast day. In the church calendar, the Memorial of St. Thomas Aquinas occurs tomorrow but because he is our patron saint – and because our identity as the Body of Christ is most fully expressed and lived out when we gather together in the liturgy – the Church permits us to transfer that feast to the closest Sunday so that we can celebrate together. It is fitting that we do that because in the liturgy the true nature of our identity is most fully present.

In the Gospel today, Jesus reveals the true nature of his identity. And he does so in the context of the liturgy – not our Catholic Mass, but the Jewish liturgy of the local synagogue, where the Scriptures were proclaimed and commented upon. As we heard, Jesus is in his hometown of Nazareth, and what’s more he is among his “parish” community, the family and friends with whom he gathered each week to praise God. It is in this familiar setting – among all these people who knew him – that Jesus reveals what they did not know: his true self, his identity as God’s Son. He is the Messiah that they have been awaiting; he is the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel.

What Jesus first proclaimed in that synagogue centuries ago continues to be proclaimed in the present day by the Church. In Christ, God grants liberty to captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed. The presence of Jesus introduces something new in the world: a rejuvenation of creation by God, salvation for all that had been lost. Everyone who bears the name of Christian – every person, and every community – also bears the responsibility to make that salvation known to others, to proclaim by word and deed the new life of grace that is found in Christ.

The celebration of our feast day is an opportunity to be proud of our parish community, of the family of God that we are and the works of God that we do. Our parish has served the community of the University of Arkansas for some 60 years, and while much has changed in that time – in the university, in our Church, and in the broader world – our presence remains, and our mission is the same as ever: to proclaim the Good News of Jesus and to give witness to the Catholic faith. All of the things that we do and have done throughout our history as a parish – all of our campus ministry programs, our service and outreach to the broader community, even all of the prayer and witness that we practice in our own private lives – all of it is in service to the message and the mission of Jesus.

Sadly, that mission is not always well-received. In next week’s Gospel, we will hear that the people of Nazareth – Jesus’s own family and friends – will respond negatively to the new identity he has shared with them. They believe there’s no way that the Jesus they know can be the Savior, not the one whom they have watched mature in their midst. Their familiarity with him breeds contempt, and so they reject the Good News that he has come to bring.

Familiarity can also breed contempt today as well. The Good News of Jesus is seemingly well-known today – and yet how far our world feels from actually accepting it, from actually living it out. The Christian mystery has lost none of its vigor, none of its relevance, but at times we who are responsible to proclaim that message to the world have become lax in doing so. We are more comfortable in adopting other identities: identities from culture, sports, or hobbies; political identities; identities shaped by the causes and movements (even good ones) that we care about; etc. Each of these identities, lived out the majority of our day and our week, can obscure the most fundamental identity we have – the identity that we discover here, in the context of the liturgy. When that happens, then it can become easy for others to reject the Gospel message that we say we bring, the identity of Christian that we say we are. In time, even we ourselves can begin to doubt just how important that mission of Jesus is, just how much our identity in Christ really is the most fundamental, the most crucial identity we have. 

                  

 

Friends, the questions that arise when we meet someone – “Who are we?”, “What are we about?” – are not just questions for others. They are questions also for ourselves. As we celebrate our feast day, we recognize that we are the parish of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic community here at the University of Arkansas. Even more fundamentally, we remember that we are each members of the Body of Christ, as St. Paul tells us, sharers in the very identity and the very mission that Jesus himself had when he walked the earth. We too are called to proclaim his healing, his reconciliation, his peace to others. But we can’t share with anyone what we ourselves do not truly possess. We have to continually be grounded in the identity we find here, in the liturgy – in the communal celebration of Jesus’s Perfect Sacrifice to the Father.

St. Thomas Aquinas once said it is a Christian’s greatest joy to praise God in the Mass because the Mass “is the fulfillment of Christ’s Mystical Body.” Gathered together as the Body of Christ, today and at every Mass, we remember what Christ has done for us, and what he calls us to do now for others. As we prepare to receive the Sacrament of the Lord's Body and Blood, may the intercession of our patron saint help us to worthily receive the Lord’s Presence and then share that Presence fruitfully by our lives.

Beloved of the Bridegroom

The Miracle at the Wedding at Cana (1693) by Nicolás Correa

For most of us, Christmas probably feels like a distant memory. The trees have come down, the gifts we gave and received have been well used at this point, and the better part of the first month of the new year is past.

And yet, the afterglow of those celebrations remains with us in certain ways. In a few weeks, we will commemorate what used to be the end of the Christmas season, Candlemas, or the Feast of Jesus’s Presentation in the Temple, which occurs forty days after December 25, or February 2. And while the contemporary liturgical calendar now has us back in Ordinary Time, historically this period used to be known as Epiphany-tide, a season that continued the celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany, which we observed two weeks ago. The word “epiphany” means “manifestation” or “revelation” – the idea being that in Jesus God has made himself and his power known to us. Three events in the life of Jesus are associated with the celebration of the Epiphany. The first is the adoration of the Magi, the Gentiles who come to worship the newborn Jewish king, who is also God-in-the-Flesh. The second is the baptism of Jesus, when it is revealed that he is the Only-Begotten Son of the Father, upon whom the Holy Spirit rests.

The third and final event connected with the Epiphany is the story that we hear today from the Gospel of John. The changing of water into wine is certainly miraculous, but it might seem fairly pedestrian compared to some of Jesus’s more astounding works of healing the sick, feeding the thousands, and raising the dead to life. Why is this the first miracle that Jesus performed? Was it simply because his mother asked to him, and because he was a dutiful son? Or is there something more going on?

We get a hint of the answer in the first reading from Isaiah. Through the Prophet’s promise, God gives words of comfort and hope – that he will restore to glory Jerusalem, the city that personified the Jewish people, the city in which God himself dwelled. Following upon the Babylonian exile, and all of the mourning and misery that came with it, God assures his people that he will restore them to glory. Isaiah uses the language of love to signify just how much God means this. His commitment to his people is total, his love for them absolute – as much as a bridegroom is devoted to his bride, God is faithful to those whom he has chosen.

If there is one idea that we have been recalling over and over the last several weeks, it is that Jesus is – in himself – the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promise, and indeed all of God’s promises to mankind. Returning to the Gospel, we can see that it is no mere coincidence that Jesus’s first miracle takes place at a wedding. His very presence – in the scene at Cana, or in the human experience as a whole – is transformative, because in him, God has joined himself to us. In Jesus, God has wed his people. In this symbolic reading of the story, the transformation of water into wine is not just a way for the wedding party to continue – it’s a way to understand how the coming of Christ, the presence of Jesus with us, proves God’s love and faithfulness has been fulfilled. This miracle stands at the head of John’s Gospel because in a sense it contextualizes how everything that Jesus does and is – all of that healing the sick, feeding the thousands, raising the dead to life – are part of God’s work of restoring his people to himself.

We too are part of that restorative work. In the Gospel, the headwaiter comments upon the “good wine” that is the result of Jesus’s transformation. It was the duty of the Bridegroom to furnish the refreshments for the guests: to satisfy them and make them merry. Experiencing God’s love helps us awaken to the need to turn away from lesser, falser loves. God’s love does not appeal to our baser instincts but rather calls out to the deepest part of ourselves. There is within each of us a thirst, a longing for authentic love – and the love of Jesus satisfies that thirst in a way no other love can. Indeed, having tasted the “good wine” of Christ, our lives should take on a new character, endowed with a meaning and a purpose they had not had previously. The Gospel tells us that Jesus’s disciples began to believe in him after the miracle at Cana – it confirmed for them the love of a God made visible and real. In fact, there is even an ancient tradition that the man whose wedding it was is actually the Gospel writer himself, St. John, who from that point forward began to follow him, who became known as “the Beloved” disciple.

Friends, we are each “beloved,” we are each “espoused” by God, who loves us with a faithful love. That Christmas message, that Epiphany reality, is a message for every season: that in his Son, God has proven his love for us. If you have forgotten that fact, or been unconvinced by it recently, seek the love of Jesus the Bridegroom. Be fortified by the “good wine” of Jesus, which delights in a way the world cannot, and which restores and refreshes us with the knowledge of God’s faithfulness. May this story of the miracle at Cana begin something new within each of us, so that we may come more and more to believe.

Humble Greetings

Adoration of the Magi (c. 1660) by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

With each passing year, traditional Christmas cards seem to become more and more relics of the past. I am as bad about sending them out as anyone. In the age of ever-present social media, and with Skype and FaceTime so accessible for many of us, the practice of actually sitting down to write out Christmas greetings by hand seems increasingly quaint, and perhaps for that reason, all the more meaningful.

If Christmas cards seem increasingly scarce these days, then far rarer still are receiving personal Christmas greetings. In the Gospel today, we heard the story of the original personalized Christmas greeting, not in a card but in a visit. The Solemnity of the Epiphany presents us with an annual opportunity to reflect upon the Magi and the adoration that they come to bring the Christ-child. On the one hand, the Magi are very familiar to us – wearing their fine robes and crowns, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, accompanied by camels. On the other hand, they are quite mysterious – they come from an unknown country, from an unknown past, and then disappear as quickly as they have come, to an unknown future. While many scholars have speculated about who exactly these Wise Men are, and how they could have known about Christ’s birth, the Gospel account highlights instead the purpose for which they have come – to worship the newborn Jewish king. More than where they are from, or what they do after, what is important is the fact that the Magi have actually come in adoration.

As we heard, they came to adore a king – but surely not the kind of king they expected to find. Jesus’s birth was foretold by prophecies and heralded by the light of a star, and yet the Magi find him in a lowly place. It is interesting that the Gospel account gives no indication that the Magi are taken aback by Jesus’s humble circumstances. There’s no doubt the Magi would have expected to find him in some palace, not in a humble dwelling; but nonetheless, having found him, they are not shocked or repulsed but only filled with great joy. And then, as we heard, having presented him the gifts they had brought, they return to their own country by another way.

There is a lot in this account, and about today’s feast in general, that is worthy of our reflection. But perhaps it is sufficient to return to the central theme: the adoration of a king, but a king born in a very un-kingly way. Whatever their expectations, whatever their preconceptions, the Magi worship the one they find. We know even better than the Wise Men precisely who this newborn child is: not just the king of the Jews, but the God of the Jews, born in human flesh. This appearance of God in our world – as a humble child, small and vulnerable – probably does not fit our expectations. It is not how we would have drawn it up – it’s not how we would imagine God revealing himself in our midst. And yet it is what happened.

If there is a lesson for us in this, to reflect upon on this great feast, it is perhaps that God’s humility must always prompt humility in us as a response. We all are guilty at times of creating Christianity in our own image, so to speak. We tend to make of our faith and our relationship with God what we believe it should be. For example, some of us gravitate more toward the doctrinal and theological aspects of our Christian tradition. For others among us, we are attracted to the social witness of Christianity, engaging with various causes and issues in the world around us. Those things are good and necessary, but they are not the core of our faith. Our Christian identity cannot be reduced to dogmatism, or activism, or any other “-ism.” Instead it is about what the Magi demonstrate for us: about a basic encounter with a Person, born into our history, who reveals God to us, and then adoring him.

The great Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles once wrote, “The Incarnation does not give us a ladder to climb out of the human condition. It gives us a drill that lets us burrow down into the heart of everything that is, and there, to find it shimmering with divinity.” Surely, such a drill can only be wielded by humble hands. Until we have grappled with the reality of God becoming Man in the person of Jesus – until the profound humility of his coming elicits from us a similar response, humble, adoring – then we really haven’t grasped what our relationship with God is all about.

It is worthwhile perhaps to reflect upon what “adoration” looks like for us in the 21st century. The Church gives us a certain number of basic foundational points: Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation; confession at least once a year, but probably more often if we’re being honest with the state of our own souls; observing days of fasting and abstinence, and helping provide for the needs of the Church; taking time for daily prayer, whether it be praying the rosary, reading Scripture, quiet meditation or Christian reading. But those make up just the starting point. If we really want to grow in worship, we have to look for God where he presents himself in the unexpected and seemingly ordinary encounters of life. Jesus the newborn king meets us in other places too: around the dinner table, at the water cooler, in the checkout line, surfing the web, in traffic, on our phones, in disagreements and disappointments, in laughter of friends and loved ones, in the quiet moments of believing and being aware of his Real Presence in the Eucharist.

My friends, what kind of greeting will we bring this day, every day to the newborn king? Is it merely perfunctory piety, like a token Christmas card? Or do we instead need to learn how to adore, like the Magi can teach us? Amid the hustle and bustle of our lives, it is easy to let our worship become merely an hour on Sunday and a hasty prayer now and again. It is perhaps all too common to adopt a merely nominal notion of being a Christian. The Wise Men present us with an alternative witness today – that faith is a long and sometimes arduous journey, that we must be always willing to meet God not according to our expectations but rather as he presents himself each day and to be filled with joy at every humble opportunity to adore. That is a wisdom available to all of us if we are humble enough to receive it – a light to guide our steps if we are wise enough to follow it.

The Prophecy Fulfilled

In his plays, William Shakespeare often used prophecy as a literary device. One of his characters, hearing some prediction about the future, would be influenced by it, often indirectly bringing the prophecy to fulfillment by their choices. For example, in the tragedy Macbeth, the title character commits murder in order to become the king of Scotland. Macbeth’s bold wickedness is partly fueled by his belief that he is invincible, because a prophecy had told him he could not be harmed by anyone born of a woman. Only too late does Macbeth learn that his main adversary Macduff was born via what we would call Caesarean section, and thus he meets his demise at Macduff’s hands.

In our second reading today, we heard Saint Paul also refer to a prophecy: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” This is a prophecy of hope not foreboding. But like the prophecies in Shakespeare, it too is fulfilled in a very surprising way.

As a good Jew, Paul knew about all of the promises God had given to the people of Israel, the covenants made with Abraham, with Moses, and with David. Paul and other Jews of his time expected God to fulfill these covenants by sending the Messiah, the one who would redeem Israel and usher in the kingdom of God. What Paul did not expect – what no one could have expected – was that God would do this by sending his own Son, by being born into history through a woman, sharing in our humanity in all things but sin.

Marianne Stokes, Madonna and Child (1905)

On this Octave day of Christmas, we have the chance to reflect upon this mystery again – not in the abstract, but in the real and the personal. In Jesus, God has given us something much more precious than just general forgiveness of our sins. He has given us Mercy made in the Flesh, Salvation made Incarnate. Mary is the first one, as we hear in the Gospel, to reflect upon this reality. She “pondered” upon the birth of Jesus, and all of the events surrounding it, and “reflected on them in her heart.” No doubt she understood how the birth of Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise to her, made through the angel Gabriel, but also the fulfillment of all of his promises made to mankind. Jesus is the answer from God to every question of life, to every longing of the human heart. God makes known his definitive self-revelation not in a decree, or a pronouncement, or a rule, but in a person. His Son has been born for us in time so that, crying out “Abba, Father!”, we may become sons and daughters of the One who exists from all time.

God’s revelation of himself in Jesus should spur in each of us a double reaction: first to really understand this Good News, and then to share it. In both of these responses, Mary is our model. The Christian cannot really properly follow Jesus without an interior life, without taking time to ponder God’s mysteries and especially how the salvation of Jesus impacts me directly. This son, born of a woman, is also God’s Son, come for my salvation. The prophecies of ancient history are fulfilled in him, and in him, I have come into communion with the one true God. This is a very important point to grasp. Jesus has come for me, to save me from my sins; he is the visible fruit of God’s love for me.

With that deeper appreciation of God's love – not just for all of humanity, but for me personally – we then are called to share it. It may not be immediately clear how Mary is a model of this as well until we realize that all of the stories of Jesus’s birth and infancy could only have come to us through her own telling. Mary is the first evangelist – the one who reflected upon God’s Good News in Jesus not just for her own sake but for the sake of others. We too must share with others the fruit of our own faith: sometimes through explicit evangelization – whether faith sharing or encouragement or generosity of heart – but probably more often through the example of daily prayer, faithful engagement with the sacraments, a joyful and peaceful spirit, and actions motivated by the love that God has shown for us. Now more than ever, we have to rediscover our identity as Christians: how our belief in the love of God made visible in Jesus must be a point of differentiation for us from the rest of the world.

My friends, as we begin a new year, as we continue our Christmas celebrations, let’s take time to ponder – as Paul did, as Mary did – how God’s ancient promises have been fulfilled in a marvelous and unexpected way. Jesus is the prophecy fulfilled – not in an abstract way, but in a personal, intimate one, in a way more marvelous than even Shakespeare could have devised. May this Eucharist help us to reflect more fully on this mystery of our salvation and make us ready to share it anew.