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.