ישוע Two Points: Why + the People

Mary will bear a son, and you are to name Him Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins. (Matthew 1:21)

Yeshua. God saves. That’s what the Hebrew means. Jesus. God saves.

That’s one of the angel’s main points to St. Joseph. The child has been conceived in ineffable holiness by God. The human child of your beloved Mary—the child is divine. And the divine child comes to save. You can’t name Him Xerxes or Thor or Qin Shi Huang–you can’t name Him anything but Jesus, because the whole point is: God saves. God comes to be with His people, in the flesh—in order to save His people.

Okay. Two points.

1. Salvation. From what? From slavery to ourselves, our limitations, our unshakable self-destructiveness. Salvation from interior darkness, ignorance, malice. Salvation from our incurable smallness. Salvation from pointlessness.

People say that mankind has lost the sense of sin. The popes of the twentieth century said this. But getting our sense of sin back is as easy as submitting to the questioning of any four-year-old.

Os Meum Annuntiabit Laudam Tuam

Annie Dillard

This morning during Mass, as I listened to toddlers chirping and singing out while I read the prayers from the Missal, I thought of this excellent little paragraph from Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being:

A hole in the earth’s crust releases clear water into the St. John’s River of central Florida at the rate of one hundred million gallons a day. Salt water issues from deep-sea mouths as very hot water and minerals. There iron and sulfur erupt into the sea from under the planet’s crust, and there clays form black towers. In Safad, Isaac Luria began prayers by saying, “Open thou my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.”

…Speaking of the Roman Missal, you can find my favorite prayer to God in it. It is in the seventh Preface to the Canon of the Mass used during the Season of the Year:

Sanctae Pater,…mitteres Redemptorem, quem absque peccato in nostra voluisti similitudine conversari, ut amares in nobis quod diligebas in Filio.

“Father, …You sent [our Redeemer] as one like ourselves, though free from sin, that you might see and love in us what you see and love in Christ.”

We are not allowed to use this Preface during special seasons, but during “Ordinary Time,” I use it pretty much every Sunday.

…Happy Easter, dear P&BD readers! Here is something to which the married men might be able to relate:

On a sunny morning, after a few sleep-deprived nights, we men can become emotional like women.

A man can see his wife first thing in the morning–and this after years of marriage–and think to himself, “What a beauty! I married the most beautiful woman in the world. I am the luckiest man alive!”

Well, I have not slept a lot lately. I got up this morning, unlocked the church, the sun came up, and then people starting coming in. I was overcome. The Church is my Bride, and there is none more beautiful, none more wonderful. I am rapturously in love. I love you, dear Church. Be mine forever. Love, Preacher.

He was Right

Rejoice, o heavenly powers!

…Looking for some good spiritual reading for Easter?

Try Pope Paul VI’s Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete in Domino…

…Sixteen years ago tonight I was received into the Church. I was confirmed as Mark David Mary. And I received Holy Communion for the first time…

Here is a homily for Easter:

The feast of Easter begins with God commanding us to rejoice. Rejoice, o heavens. Rejoice, o earth. Rejoice, o church. Christ our King has risen from the dead, never to die again.

God commands us to rejoice. How are we going to obey this command? Here are three ways.

One good way to rejoice is to help someone who needs help. Helping others gives us joy. It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture—just some real helpfulness, like maybe doing the dishes or taking out the trash.

A second way to rejoice is to contemplate something beautiful—like take a walk or listen to some beautiful music.

Did He Have to Do It?

The Lord Jesus freely laid down His life for the salvation of the human race. He offered Himself to the Father as a sacrifice for our sins. He did it today, on Good Friday.

Good Friday is therefore a sacred day, one of the most sacred of the year. There are a number of ways to keep the day holy—going to church for the Sacred Liturgy, or Stations of the Cross, going to Confession, prayer, fasting, abstinence from meat.

These days, though, for some people, Good Friday passes more or less unnoticed. For some people it’s as good a day as any to go to a baseball game, or watch a movie, or go out to eat.

We live in a society in which some people do not keep Good Friday holy. This forces us to confront a serious question. How we spend Good Friday is not just a matter of personal devotional choice, of private preferences. The question we have to ask is a question about the human race as a whole.

Let’s put the question like this: Did Christ really have to die for us? Did mankind need Him to make the sacrifice He made for us today? Does the human race need a Savior?

Or are we really just fine on our own? Is the human race okay by itself? Can any human being say to Christ crucified: “Hey, thanks—but you went to too much trouble. Don’t do me any favors.”

Christ is a unique human being—He is the only divine human being. With Him, the human race as a whole can stand before God and say, “Lord, we are a race of sinners. We are dust and ashes before You. You made us out of love, and we have poured contempt on You in return. But we can boast of your only-begotten Son. He is just and true—He bore witness to You unto death—and He is one of us. See and love in us what You see and love in Him, O Creator, and have mercy on us.”

On the other hand what do we human beings have to show for ourselves without Christ? Left to ourselves, what are our hopes? Let’s consider…

We humans are ingenious. We have tall buildings. We have many, many cars, many television shows, a lot of guns and ammo. Our race has produced both LeBron James and Kobe Bryant at the same time. We have invented pizza, modern medicine, cellphones, umbrellas, space shuttles, and numerous other accomplishments. Splendid.

But when we go to meet God at the end of our lives, what will we do with all these things? Will they do us any good?

None of our accomplishments can exactly recommend us to God. God is perfect, and we are not. We have no claims on Him. Before Him, we have no rights. He owes us nothing. Everything we have, He gave us in the first place.

Without Christ we would come to the end of our earthly life in a state of terrifying weakness. We would be utterly bereft.

Are you or I going to go to judgment and then pull out an iPod and say, “Look, Lord—look at all this great music I put on my iPod. Shouldn’t you reward me for that?” Or am I going to say, “Look, Lord—I was a great cook. I grilled some killer hamburgers. Send me to heaven for my hamburgers.”

It really is ridiculous, the idea that we would be alright without Christ.

Do we need a Savior? We need Him more than we need oxygen. We need Him more than we need gravity to keep us from floating into outer space. We need Christ more than we need our incorrigible selves.

There is only one thing more desperate than the suffering Christ had to endure to save us today. The only thing more desperate is just how desperately we needed Him to do it.

Where Else Would We Be?

Parochial vicars usually do not preach on Holy Thursday. We usually listen to the pastor preach, like everyone else does.

Two years ago, though, I had the privilege of preaching on Holy Thursday. This morning, I was trying to organize some of my files, and I turned up that homily. Here it is:

Worst of the Bad Guys

Here is what happened:

Matthew Mark Luke John

Consider all the evildoers involved. Then answer:

Feel free to add a comment to explain your choice.

Crouching Spider, Little Bird

If you are a Lord of the Rings fan, then you know that Shelob is the ancient, giant spider that almost killed Frodo when he entered the land of Mordor.

Few of us would want to encounter such a creature. Nonetheless, it is fun for any afficionado of Middle Earth to visit Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture. The truculent iron spider is currently in front of the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington.

"Crouching Spider" on Independence Avenue

…The Lord Jesus said: “Which one of you would hand his son a stone when he asked for a loaf of bread, or a snake when he asked for a fish? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him.”

St. Therese of Lisieux wrote:

I look upon myself as a weak little bird…I am not an eagle…In spite of my extreme littleness, I still dare to gaze upon the Divine Sun, the Sun of Love, and my heart feels within it all the aspirations of the eagle…

O Jesus, I know and so do You that the imperfect little creature, while remaining in its place (that is, under the Sun’s rays), allows itself to be somewhat distracted from its sole occupation. It picks up a piece of grain on the right or on the left; it chases after a little worm; then coming upon a little pool of water, it wets its feathers still hardly formed. It sees an attractive flower and its little mind is occupied with this flower. In a word, being unable to soar like the eagles, the poor little bird is taken up with the trifles of earth.

And yet, after all these misdeeds, instead of going and hiding away in a corner, to weep over its misery and to die of sorrow, the little bird turns toward its beloved Sun, presenting its wet wings to its beneficent rays. It cries like a swallow and in its sweet song it recounts in detail all its infidelities, thinking in the boldness of its full trust that it will acquire in even greater fullness the love of Him who came to call not the just but sinners.

Jesus, I am too little to perform great actions, and my own folly is this: to trust that Your Love will accept me.

–St. Therese of Liseux, Story of a Soul, chapter IX (Manuscript B)

Palliative Distractions, more Mark 6, and Father Maciel

Hoyas now a miserable 4-7 in the Big East

Quick! Anything–anything–to distract us from the pain of Total Hoya Meltdown!

Holy Family Sunday

1) San Fran weather update

2) Environmentalist Pope Benedict says no to “gender ideology”:

The Creator helps Christians to understand our responsibility toward the earth. It is not simply our property to be exploited according to our interests and desires. Rather, it is a gift of the Creator.

However, concern for God’s creation cannot be limited to care for the natural environment– although that is certainly a part of it. Far more important is the Church’s mission to preserve the ecology of the human being, understood in the proper manner. The Church must teach clearly about the nature of the human person, to counteract the influence of secular ideologies that confuse and diminish human dignity. God created man and woman as complementary, and the Church demands that this order of creation be respected by promotion of marriage and family life.

3) Your servant’s Holy Family Sunday homily:

In the beginning, God created mankind. Then, in the fullness of time, He became man. In the beginning, He made man and woman to be a family. In the fullness of time, He became a member of a family.

Rounding Out the Four Majors

Scala Santa

After a week of pressing hard towards the goal, many of us were the worse for wear today. Speaking for myself, the tiredness in my legs made the whole day seem like a climb up the Holy Steps of Jerusalem. (More about this below.)

The Pope has four Major Basilicas in Rome. The pilgrim to Rome visits all four.

The first two are the shrines of the Apostles Peter and Paul. The other two are the cathedral of Rome and the neighborhood church of our hotel, on the top of the Esquiline Hill.

Our Mass this morning was in the Cesi Chapel of St. Mary Major. We couldn’t stay for a proper visit to the Basilica after Mass, because we had an appointment. We had time for a quick visit to the tomb of St. Monica, which is in the Roman church dedicated to her son, St. Augustine. Then we had to press on to our meeting.

As I mentioned in previous installments, Yours Truly went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land earlier this year. I traveled with a group of 25 priests. We were led by Archbishop Raymond Burke. At that time, Archbishop Burke was the Archbishop of St. Louis, Missouri.

Archbishop Raymond Burke, Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura

Since then, the Pope asked Archbishop Burke to come to Rome to serve as the Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura. This is the rough equivalent in the Church of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Because he occupies this important post, Archbishop Burke will certainly be created a Cardinal at the next Consistory.

This morning, Archbishop Burke received us in the Palazzo Cancelleria, a Renaissance palace in downtowm Rome where his office is located. He explained the work of his office, encouraged us in the faith, and gave us his blessing.

Then we lunched in the nearby Piazza Navona, the center of Rome’s social life. From there we took a quick busride to the home of the Popes for the millenia from fourth to the fourteenth centuries–the Lateran.

Piazza Navona

As we recall from celebrating the Feast of the Dedication of the Laterna Basilica twelve days ago, this church is the Mother and Head of all the churches, the cathedral of Peter.

Inside, there are Baroque statues of the Twelve Apostles lining the nave, which was designed by Bernini. In the baldacino over the high altar are reliquaries containing the heads of Sts. Peter and Paul. Pope Martin V, who brought the Papacy back to Rome after it had been moved to France for a few tumultuous decades, is bured in the confessio (under the high altar). The table our Lord used at the Last Supper is in a reliquary over the tabernacle. The great Pope Leo XIII is entombed here.

Across the road from the Basilica are the ruins of the original Apostolic Palace, the home of the Popes for a thousand years. The only remnant of this once-grand edifice is a chapel called the “Holy of Holies.” The pilgrim reaches this chapel by ascending steps used by our Lord Himself.

Reliquary containing part of the Manger from Bethlehem

St. Helena (the Emporer Constantine’s mother) went to Jerusalem to bring back to Rome as many relics of our Lord’s life as she could find. The most massive relic she recovered was the set of steps leading up to the entrance of Pilate’s praetorium. Christ would have walked up these steps to be judged by Pilate, and He would have walked down them after He had been condemned to death. The original stone steps are encased in wood. We ascended these steps on our knees.

After this, we returned to Santa Maria Maggiore to visit and complete our Roman pilgrimage. We stopped in front of the confessio (in which the reliquary of the Manger is kept) to recite the Creed, Our Father, and Hail Mary.

I will have more to say about our pilgrimage. Now, however, we will dine together to say farewell to the Eternal City over a glass or two of montepulciano. Arrivaderci for the moment.