The CreedinHigh

Definition:

A Series ofSermons on theApostles’ Creed

Revd Fr Christopher Smith, STDPrince of Peace Catholic Church

Taylors, SC

Fr Smith’s Creed in Slow Motion

1. I Believe

This may seem like ancient history now, but you might

remember that, until last December, when we prayed the

Nicene Creed at Mass, we started it off with the words, We

believe. Then, we switched to I believe. This was part of the new

translation of the Roman Missal. In order to be more

faithful to the Latin original of the texts of the Mass, we

began to say I believe because that is what the Latin used in

the Mass says. But when the Creed was composed in Greek at

the Council of Nicaea in 325, it began with the Greek word

pisteoumen, We believe.

One is a liturgical text used at Mass, while the other

is the actual statement that the Bishops thundered forth at

the first ecumenical council. Last week we talked about how

the Creeds got their start as part of the baptismal liturgy,

when the Bishop would ask each one to be baptized, Do you

believe in God the Father Almighty? Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Do you

believe in the Holy Spirit? The point is that, when it comes to

professing our faith, there is an I, a We and a You in the

Church, and they are all important.

St Paul tells the Romans (10.17), faith comes from hearing.

At some point in our lives, we all come in contact with the

Word, with Jesus Christ. For some of us, like St Paul, it

may come in the form of a road to Damascus moment in a

dramatic conversion all at once. For others, the Word is

shared to us by our parents or our teachers. And some of us

discover the faith quite on our own, sometimes with that

Word being found in the depths of our souls, leading us to

something, or someone beyond ourselves. But no matter how

it happens, the Word that is uttered from all eternity from

the Father, comes to us. Psalm 115.6 tells us, they have ears

but they do not hear, they have noses but do not smell, and so there are

people for whom the Word just doesn’t seem to have any

effect. Why? Well, the fact that you have an ear means

that you can hear, but it doesn’t mean that you do hear, or

want to hear. There may be something missing in the complex

apparatus that makes sound waves striking an ear drum a

thought intelligible to mind and heart. Or they may be a

lack of willpower to hear. Some people just don’t pay

attention, or they distract themselves, or they put their

hands over their ears and shout loudly so they won’t hear.

But there are those who do hear the Word, and faith

comes when the Good News reaches our ears, but instead of

going in one ear and out the other as just another assualt

of sound waves on our body, the Word penetrates the depths

of our hearts and leaves us forever changed. It is the gift

of faith that then allows us to say, I believe. Now, it may be

easy on a Sunday morning to mumble quietly We believe, almost

in a whisper, to disappear among the great throngs of people

who every Sunday of centuries have said the same words.

From one point of view, it is a very comforting thing. We

can look at the words of the Creed and know that Christians

have all said they believe the same things faith proposes

for centuries upon centuries. We are just individuals among

many, many billions of people. And we know that there are

lots of Christians who are not Catholics who say the Creed

just like we do: the Orthodox, the Anglicans, the

Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the Methodists, we are all

together in a big huge We believe all the time. There is

great unity and comfort in that, and it is the basis on

which we can go beyond the divisions among Christians to the

unity Jesus prayed for in the garden of Gethsemane.

That great We of the undivided Church is a whole

greater than the sum of its parts, but that We is also made

up of each one of us. Each one of us, in one way or

another, has to stand, not shoulder to shoulder with other

Christians in church, biut quite alone sometimes in all

kinds of places, and say I believe, publicly. I must stand up

and be counted, personally responsible for those simple, but

deep words, I believe. And when I say them, sometimes I want to

say them, loud and proud, full throated and with life. But

other times, I say them timidly, even tepidly, not wanting

to stand out among the crowds, but I still say it. And why

do I say it? What gives me the courage to say, I believe, at

all? I mean, there are all kinds of people who could look

at the text of the Apostles’ Creed and start it out just as

energetically with the words, I do not believe.

In 1252 a young Dominican priest named Peter of Verona

was taking a walk near Milan and he was ambushed by a group

of young ruffians. Now, these were no run of the mill

miscreants. They were religious zealots who were infected

with the heresy of Catharism, and they wanted everyone to

believe that anything that had to do with created matter was

evil. It was the religious fad of the day, to say that the

Church and the sacraments and the liturgy and all that were

bunk because everything physical was in illusion created by

the devil anyway. Peter was able to show people that this

belief had no grounding in reality, and the Cathars hated

him for it, so they jumped him and stuck an axe in his head

because he didn’t believe what they did.

So what could Peter do? He couldn’t exactly hold a

conversation on why these Cathars believed something which

was false. And so he just started to recite the Apostle’s

Creed. He dipped his finger in the blood spouting from his

head and wrote on the ground, Credo in unum Deum – I believe in one

God. It was a senseless act of violence perpetrated by

religious fundamentalists who sincerely believed that

everything in creation is evil. And Peter responded the way

Catholics do in front of things that are just plain stupid:

by dramatically reaffirming what is not stupid with whatever

he had at hand at the time, and al lhe had at his disposal

was the blood coming out of his head and the Creed he

learned as a child.

We may be tempted to see this as just a sad tragedy.

But Peter offered himself up as a sacrifice of love for the

people who killed him. He is a saint whose feast is

celebrated every year. The Cathars who killed him: well,

cane you name one of them, and have you ever met a Cathar

today?

Today, though, most people fall into two camps: those

who affix I do not believe to anything that the Church says, and

those who say, You can believe anything you want, as long as you believe in

something: they are all equal ways to God. So what is the difference

between Peter of Verona as an orthodox Christian and the

Cathars who also said they were Christian and murdered him?

Do we just say, “Well, the Cathars were mean and killed

people and that’s not cool, and Peter of Verona, poor guy,

he just stood up for what he believed and was in the wrong

place at the wrong time, so too bad for him.” Or is there

something more here?

Peter of Verona was able to stand apart, alone, and

proclaim I believe, just like the Cathars did. But what made

the difference is that what Peter believed, and what we

believe is true. It is revealed by God through His Church,

and when that truth was united to love, by an act of self-

sacrifice for the conversion to truth of the errant, it

resulted in something beautiful. The Cathar heresy was

vanquished, not because the Church was successful in

stamping it out, but because it was untrue, and the heroic

virtue of martyrs like Peter of Verona showed that it was a

lie.

The first time someone asked you, Do you believe in God? you

were probably a baby and your parents answered yes for you.

You were then brought into the Church where we all believe

certain things about this God. But from time to time, you

will have to stand up, stand alone, stand apart and say, I

believe. You say, I believe it because it is true. And whether you

say it quietly as a sign of contradiction to the world gone

mad with error, or whether you go out to heaven with a bang

like the martyrs, say it. Oh, and by the way, the guy who

put the axe in Peter’s head? Well, he saw the error of his

ways, became a Catholic, became a Dominican, and is now

known as Blessed Carino of Balsamo. All because someone had

the courage to say, I believe.

2. I Believe in God

As long as I can remember, I have believed in God. As a kid

I used to look up into the stars at night and try to imagine

the infinity of the universe beyond them, and I knew that

there was some First Mover who had to put everything into

motion, including me. So I was very excited when I went off

to the seminary to spend years studying theology, the

science of God. But on my very first day of classes at the

Gregorian University, home to one of the most renowned

theological faculties in the world, something happened to me

that I still find hard to explain.

I sat there in class and thought to myself, “How do we

know any of this is true? How can I have any certainty that

any of what we are doing in this class right now has any

relationship to reality?” So my childhood faith was

shattered in an instant, not under duress of argument, not

under force of torture, but in a classroom where I was

preparing to be a priest of a religion I suddenly thought

was all wrong. Now, of course, I had no idea what to do.

My frame of reference for my entire life was the faith, so

what do you do when it’s gone? Well, I didn’t know what to

do, and so, just after having been in the seminary for a

couple of weeks, I went to confession. And so I knelt in

the box: “Bless me Father, for I have sinned, it has been

two weeks since my last confession. And this is my sin.

Uh, I don’t believe in God. I’m not quite sure what to do

now. My whole life has been a preparation for entering the

seminary and now I don’t even know if God is real.”

Poor dear Fr Mauro, my confessor. You know what he

did? He laughed at me. There was no attempt at compassion,

or the beginning of a dialogue. He just said, “Yes you do,

don’t be stupid. For your penance say the Our Father one

time.” And that was it. I was fuming when I went out of the

confessional. I had bared my soul to him and he laughed at

me. But you know what? I realized that it was a temptation

against faith, that I had entertained, and I did the only

thing I knew to do when faced with a temptation: I went to

Jesus, very simply stated my case as I saw it, and I

received a very special grace. The cloud of my unbelief was

lifted, never to return again. From that day forward, I

have never again had such a temptation. Now that’s not to

say that it will never happen again, but I was grateful for

that moment. God gave me a choice to accept or reject Him.

I was pretty sure I had rejected Him, but in going to

Confession, I put myself under the power of His Grace and

Mercy, and he won.

Little did I know at the time that Saints much holier

than I have had experiences much more dramatic than mine. A

young French playboy named Charles de Foucauld was entirely

certain, like any young late 19th century rationalist, that

there was no God. But he was still fascinated by religion.

So one day he went to the most famous confessor in Paris at

the time, the Abbé Huvelin. He knelt at the grille and

asked the priest to tell him about the faith. And the

priest told him, “Confess your sins.” And Charles was like,

“Um, that’s not what I am here for. I want you to convince

me that there is a God.” The priest responded, “I said,

Confess your sins!” and they went back and forth until

finally Charles had told his entire life story to the

priest. As soon as he received Holy Communion at Mass right

afterwards, he was flooded with an experience of faith. A

French army man by trade, he then went out into the Sahara

Desert to live among the Tuareg tribes as a hermit, the only

Christian, the only priest as far as the sands of the

Tamanrasset could see.

There is something about the phenomenon of religion,

and the practice of the Catholic religion in particular,

which has attracted people to it for centuries. Man is

always searching for God. Now, there are some who say that

this is just some deep psychological need to find a way to

transcend ourselves and our limitedness. The preachers of

the New Atheism, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens

most notable among them, tell us that there is nothing

beyond what we can see and taste and touch and hear and

smell. It is the fundamental dogma of atheism, and it does

not tolerate any doubt. The Christian, though, counters

that, God is precisely what is beyond human reason, and so

no amount of human reasoning is going to prove, desprovee or

describe what by its very definition is beyond the scope of

the human intellect. But because atheist doctrine is so

inflexible, they see belief in God as the source of all evil

in the world, because they do know that exists and can’t

come up with any other explanation for it than to pin it on

those who hold that there is a súmmum bonum , a supreme

Good. Now, for the life of me I can’t understand why they

waste so much time and energy fighting something that they

tell us doesn’t exist, but they do. And in front of their

increasingly violent attempts to extinguís faith in God, we

stand before them with the poverty of our faith, a faith

which allows questions, can withstand moments of doubt, and

which still moves mountains and sees miracles in the

ordinary daily ebb and flow of life.

But for all of the sarcastic and sophomoric

editorializing about how much of a waste of time believing

in a God the atheists waste more time obsessing over than we

do, man still searches for God. What led St Simon Stylites,

in 5th Century Syria, to perch himself on a pillar for years

to pray? What led the brilliant Benedict of Nursia to

abandon his studies and a brilliant career in 6th Century

Rome to flee to a cave at Subiaco to pray? What led Charbel

Makhlouf in 19th Century Lebanon to spend the entire morning

preparing to celebrate Mass every day, and the rest of every

day in thanksgiving for that Mass? What led the beautiful

young American woman known as Sister Nazarena to wall

herself up in a chapel in Rome from 1939 until she died in

1990? The word monk comes from the Greek monos, which means

solitary. In every age, men and women have thirsted for God

so much that the world has no allure for them. They set

out, on purpose, for the desert of solitude, so that they

can find a God that they know exists, and they cannot rest

until they are entierely at one with Him.

Now, most of us are not called to a monastic vocation

to radical solitude. But we still search for God. But how

do we go from looking for Him to finding Him and then

becoming one with Him? We know far too well that many have

set out on the adventure of faith and turned back. No one

is born an atheist, and no one loses the faith all at once.

To say, I believe in God, is not the same thing as to say, I

believe that George Washington was the first president of the United States, I

believe that Al Qaeda cells of terrorists exist, I believe that tomorrow the sun will

rise in the East. To say, I believe in God, requires, not first of all

an act of faith. That comes later. It requires that we

come to grips with our own littleness and crucify our pride.

It requires that we develop the virtue of humility to

realize that God is beyond what cannot be felt or thought.

It requires that we abandon ourselves to Him. Then, and

only then, can we receive from God the gift of supernatural

faith to say Yes, God is Who He says He is, in my heart, in

history and in the living tradition of the Church.

Many people were scandalized to read after she died

Mother Teresa’s spiritual correspondence published as Come

be my Light. From the time she chose to serve the poorest of

the poor in Calcutta until she died, she was plagued by

spiritual dryness and the feeling of absence of the divine

presence that she felt so keenly her whole life. Mother

Teresa persevered in faith. I believe in God was not something

she just repeated with her lips every Sunday at Mass. She

heroically abandoned herself to love because she knew that

where love was found, God was present there. Her whole life

was an act of abandonment, an act of faith.

I think this is why Mother Teresa is one of the most

important Saints for our modern age. She was not a selfless

philanthropist who spent her years doing good deeds for the

poor. She became a living flame of love that was a sign to

the world of the transforming power of love, the presence of

God, although in the midst of being so she could not see it

herself. Mother Teresa’s spiritual journey is the perfect

anitdote to the self-absorbed counterfeit “spirituality”

which fashions religion in our own image to make us feel

good about ourselves. In her, we find Jesus’ words in

Matthew 10.39, Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life

for My sake will find it, to be real.

Are you still searching for God and can’t seem to find

Him? You must lose your life in a heroic act of abandonment

to a life of love. That is the only way that we will allow

God to find us, and for our I believe in God to mean anything.

Charles de Foucauld once wrote a beautiful Prayer of

Abandonment. I want to you to pray it along with me now, so

that you can find God:

Father, I abandon myself into your hands ;do with me what you will.

Whatever you may do, I thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all.

Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures -I wish no more than

this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul: I offer it to you with all the love of my heart,

for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself , to surrender myself into your

hands without reserve ,and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.

3. I Believe in God, the Father Almighty

In Exodus 24 we read about how the LORD asked Moses to come

with Aaron the High Priest and 70 elders to Mount Sinai.

Before they left, they offered sacrifice and the Israelites

left behind said, We will do all that the Lord has bidden us. At the

foot of Mt Sinai Moses and the group had a vision of God,

and began to climb the mountain. Suddenly though, God tells

Moses, Come up to the mountain and abide with Me there. Moses begins

to climb to the top alone, and the mountain was veiled in cloud. We

read that for six days the Glory of the Lord abode there on Sinai . . . and on

the seventh day, from the heart of that Darkness, the Lord called to him. Moses

then ascends to the summit of the mountain, which from the

bottom looked like it was on fire. And Moses spent 40 days

and 40 nights on top of the mountain alone with God.

We all know the story of what happened. Exodus 32

tells us that the Israelites, not knowing what happened to

Moses, convinced Aaron the High Priest to fashion a Golden

calf from their jewelry. They offered burnt sacrifices and welcome

offerings, and with that, the people sat down to take their pleasure.

Meanwhile, the Lord tells Moses, Away, down with thee. They have

fallen into sin. So Moses goes down the mountain and sees this

idolatrous little feast going on. He is so mad that he

throws the tablets of the Law he had just recieved down,

burned the Golden calf into ashes which he then out in the

water and forced the Hebrews to drink, and then instructed

the priests to disarm the whole lot of them, and the priests

then killed about 23,000 of them for their idolatry. Exodus

32.35 tells us, the Lord, then, made the people suffer for their wickedness

in the matter of the calf Aaron made for them.

I think that it is important for us, if we are to say I

believe in God and mean it, to meditate on this episode from

the Old Testament. There is a reason why the first

commandment is I am the Lord your God, you shall habve no other gods

before Me. It is first because it is the most important, and

because it is the one that we need to be reminded of the

most often. The Israelites have just been saved from

slavery to their Egyptian overlords with about as much

miraculous events as you can imagine. They have been led to

a base of a high mountain where their leader is called into

a cloud with a burning summit. They have had plenty of

supernatural signs as to the presence of the One True God.

It’s not like they didn’t know that God was real, and was

doing all kinds of amazing things for them.

But when their leader seems to disappear, for seven and

then for forty more days, they begin to panic. They can

still see this strange thing of a mountain curiously wrapped

in cloud with a burning summit, the sign of the presence of

God is still right there in front of their faces, and they

begin to fear. They still believe in God, but they want a

tangible sign of His presence, something like all of those

pagan tribes around them had to their gods. And so they

exchange faith in an invisible god for a right jolly old

feast in front of a statue made with their own hands. They

hadn’t stopped believing in God, even the true God. But

while the Lord was giving Moses all kinds of instructions on

how the Hebrews should live and how they should worship God,

they were telling Aaron the High Priest how they wanted to

live and worship God.

When Moses finds out about it, filled with zeal for the

true worship of God, he goes wild. He not only incinerates

the statue and forces the people to drink the ashes from it,

he orders the slaughter of 32,000 of them. Now, if this

makes you uncomfortable, well, it should. God will not be

mocked, and He refuses idolatry. The Israelites thought

they could get away with telling Aaron, and through him God

Himself, how they were going to live and how they were going

to perceive God and deal with Him. And God punishes them.

When we say, I believe in God the Father Almighty, we

acknowledge that He is Almighty and we are not. He reveals

to us who He is and how we wants to be worshipped, through

the Scriptures and the Tradition of the Church. We need to

repeat those words often, because we, like the Israelites,

can see supernatural signs of the presence of God, we can

say we believe in God, and still, instead of assent to a

religion revealed by God, make it up as we go along.

The fundamental temptation of the religious person is

to ignore Divine Revelation and craft our own golden calf.

For 2000 years, men and women have rebelled against the

authority of the one true Church and told God that they

could do it better. And one by one they have made their own

images of God and worshipped them instead of the living and

true God. They cast the Almighty from His Throne and out

themselves and their own ideas in its place.

When we dare to say, I believe in God the Father Almighty, we

have to realice that God is not us. He is our Father. We

have our origin and we have our end in Him. He is the

author of our life and death, and we have no other reason to

exist than to do His will. Jesus tells His disciples in

John 15.14, If you do all that I command you, you are my friends. God the

Father invites us into a relationship with Him through His

Son, Jesus Christ. We are not His biological sons and

daughters, but we become His sons and daughters through

adoption by the life of grace. Thus we must respect our

Father by following what He commands. Don’t tell God how

you think He should be worshipped and how you want to live.

This is idolatry, and God will not allow it. Just as a

father punishes his child, not because he hates him, but to

get him to understand that certain things lead to ruin, when

we pursue the golden calf God will allow things to happen to

us until we stop trying to make Him into what we want Him to

be and allow Him to be the Almighty Father that He is.

One of the hardest things I have to do as a spiritual

father is to see it when people insist on their own way

before God. I can tell them 1000 ways from Sunday that it

is not going to work, and like the Israelites at Sinai, many

of them are going to try to do it their way. And I look

sadly as destruction rains down all around them, and they

don’t get why. All I can do is what Moses did: get upset

and then offer sacrifices to God on their behalf. As a

Church, we have a duty to hand on the faith revealed to us

by Christ. There are a million and one voices telling us,

“the Church nneds to change this and the Church needs to

change that.” There a million and one voices who are

dancing around like fools around a golden calf pretending it

is God, when it is not. And so we must always resist the

temptation to do the same. We must not only say that God is

the Father Almighty, but we must let Him be our Father,

leading us to His interior life, and we must let Him be

Almighty, to let Him have the power and the glory, and not

try to take it for ourselves.

4. Creator of Heaven and Earth

Sometimes the most obvious things can be the hardest to

really understand. All of us know we exist. The very fact

that we can think about the fact that we exist is already a

sign that we do. Now, thay hasn’t stopped some people from

ignoring the obvious, or trying to come up with an

alternative explanation for it. There are certain schools

of thought within Buddhism and Hinduism, which seem to be

all the rage with Westerners who like their religion to be

cafeteria-style, which say that everything is an illusion

and is the cause of suffering. We should seek to escape

everything that is, because, well, it doesn’t really exist

anyway. Even in ancient Greece, there was a cult of

philosophers called the solipsists, led by a curious little

man named Gorgias, who insisted that nothing actually

existed. And so it is said that the philosopher Aristotle

once quipped, “Well, sometimes you just need to beat people.

Let’s beat you up and then say I don’t exist.”

And who says philosophers are boring? The Easterners

saw the reality of human suffering and couldn’t deal with

it, so they just claimed that what we could see and

experience was just a mind game. The Solipsists said it

too. Then, Rene Descartes came around in the 17th century

and said, “I think, therefore I am.” In both cases, reality

is perception. Now, we can all agree that sometimes our

perception does not square with a reality existing outside

of our minds. But it is false to say that the only reality

is inside our mind. As Aristotle so graphically and

violently reminded us, all I have to do is wollop you a good

one upside the head to prove that wrong. But people still

go around saying it, just as they still go aroudn saying all

kinds of things that are not true.

The Church’s Creed is based in objective truth, on

reality. Her moral teaching and her doctrinal propositions

are not wish statements: wouldn’t it be great if people

didn’t kill each other and took care of the poor, wouldn’t

it be neat if there was a God who loved us? They are not

statements of how we wish the world should be, or how we

perceive the world. God revealed Himself to Moses in the

Burning Bush, I am who am. What is, or rather, Who is,

remains the standard of the message the Church proclaims in

her life.

Now, people like to say all kinds of things like, “to

be is to change” or “everything that is, changes.” And so,

even when people say that the Solipsists or Descartes or the

Hindus were wrong to say that reality is perception and that

alone, they will still say that the reality that is outside

of our consciousness still changes. And that is true of

things human. But God is He who never changes. The

religion of Islam denies this. For the Muslims, Allah can

change His mind however He wants, and so if we wants to

decree the exact opposite of what He always has, He can do

that. But that all-powerfulness of God calls into question

His goodness. He is totally arbitrary, and how can one have

a standard of justice and mercy when God is totally

arbitrary? Psalm 118.89 says differently, Your Word, O Lord is

eternal, it stands firm in the heavens. The firm and eternal word of

God that is handed down in the deposit of the faith by Jesus

to the Church is Revelation. And Revelation does not

change. Our understanding of it deepens throughout history,

but it does not change.

Revelation, in Scripture and Tradition, tells us about

God, and tells us alot about ourselves. But even if God had

not chosen to reveal Himself in Jesus Christ, through the

Bible and in the Church, there are still things we can say

about God. The first part of the Creed, I believe in God the

Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, could be said by those

who have never heard of Revelation and the Catholic Church

which is its guardian. Now, there are those who want to say

that there is no reality to God outside of our minds: He is

a figment of our imagination, or a projection of our

subconscious. He has no existence outside of ourselves.

But just as we saw with Gorgias and Descartes, there is a

reality outside of our perception. Seeing that reality is

often brutal and violent and sad doesn’t mean it’s not

there. But how do we prove that God exists outside our

minds? Is there something that the human intellect, unaided

by Revelation, can access about God?

Well, I think that all of us from as early as we can

remember have been aware that we exist. The fact that we

exist is something we don’t even think about at all until we

come across people like Gorgias, Buddha or Descartes and

then get confused by the rhetoric of people who think too

much! But there is always a point in our lives when we ask

ourselves, not whether we exist or not, but why we exist.

Why am I here? Sometimes it comes when we encounter the sad

realities of this world, and wish that we were dead, or not

here at all. Why am I here? leads us to question how we got

here in the first place, whether we were just a cosmic

accident, whether we are wanted at all.

When we begin to ask ourselves why we are here, it

brings up the question of what philosophers call causality.

What caused me to come into being. Why am I rather than

not? And that causes us to notice everything that is. Now,

everything that is, has come into being from somewhere, for

some reason, or otherwise it would not have come into being

at all. We look around at us and see this principle

verified over and over and over again in a million different

ways. I gobble down a hamburger because I am hungry. I am

hungry because I need to eat to live. I live because I

exist. I exist because mother and father brought me into

being, and their mother and father brought them into being,

and it goes on and on.

And it all goes back to what the ancients call the

Unmoved Mover, the First Cause. Now, the philosophers

identify this with God. There are some people who like to

say that this is just another prescientific conception of

reality, another myth like those we read about the Greek

gods vomiting all over the place and other weird stories

like that. But the God of the philosophers is not that God.

The God of Revelation is incompatible with the myths, Bible

and Tradition are hard to square with the myths, even though

some have tried to force some tenuous connections between

them. But the God of Revelation and the God of the

Philosophers are one and the same. They are the same

because, from our experience of Creation, of earth, we are

led to our origin and our end, and in doing so, we encounter

the God of Revelation who is perfectly consistent with that

origin and end.

The English Jesuit and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is

famous for the first line of one of his poems, “The world is

charged with the grandeur of God.” I can say that I believe

in the Creator of heaven and earth because I believe in

creation. It is all around me, it is not a figment of my

imagination, it is not an illusion, even when it is not what

I think it should be, or even what God thinks it should be.

That is why there is no war between faith and reason,

between science and religion. The God of our Fathers, of

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God revealed in the

Incarnation of Jesus Christ and the descent of the Holy

Spirit, is present in everything that is, even though He is

distinct from it. If you want to believe God exists, all it

takes is to stop forcing yourself to pretend that reality is

not there, and get out of your own head. the heavens are telling

the glory of God. Look at the moon and the sun and the stars,

look at everything around you, and let youself be carried

from this glorious creation to its incomparably more

glorious Creator.

5. and in Jesus Christ

In Luke chapter 9, right after the miracle of the

multiplication of the five loaves and two fishes, Jesus asks

his closest friends a provocative question: Who do you say that

I am? He knows that there are other people who were going

around saying that He was John the Baptist, or Elijah, or

one of the prophets of old risen from the dead. But He

wants to know who the disciples, the ones He called by name,

thought He was. They easily could have just called Him by

name, and said, “Well, you’re Jesus, our friend.” He had a

name, and one with quite a history at that. It’s Yehoshuah

or Yeshua in Hebrew, and was the name commanded by an angel

to Joseph in a dream in Matthew 1.21. And it is not any

type of name, it is a name which takes the name of God, the

name that can be never said by the Jews, and adds to it the

verb to save, so it means God saves.

It’s not the first time in the Bible the name was used.

Moses’ companion who brings the Chosen People over the

Jordan into the Promised Land is called Yehoshua in Hebrew,

too. We call him Joshua, to not confuse Him with Jesus, who

brings the new Chosen People, the Church, through the waters

of Baptism into heaven. At any rate, the Apostles could

have even responded to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that

I am?” with His name. After all, it was a name filled with

Biblical meaning, God saves, and after He started performing

all these miracles, they could have seen that the name of

Jesus pointed to who He was, to what he was sent to do: a

sign that God saves His people.

But Peter, not the first called but the first in

dignity of the apostles, responds for the whole group, “The

Christ of God” in Luke 9.20. Matthew 16.16 has a little

longer answer, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living

God.” Note that Peter does not say who Jesus is by

referring to His name, but by a title which was supposed to

reveal His essence: the word Christos in Greek, anointed one.

And Matthew reveals to us that Jesus is no ordinary man, but

the son of God. Not any kind of son of God, like you and I

are sons and daughters of God, but THE Son of God, His

anointed one. In a sense, this one little phrase is the

very first Creed. Peter, the first Bishop of Rome, the

first Pope, the first Prince of the Apostles, says that he

believes that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed Son of God.

Everything else we say in the Creed is commentary on

that first Creed which so spontaneously sprung to the lips

of Peter that day. And if we keep reading Luke chapter 9 we

then see that Jesus takes him and James and John up the

mount and is transfigured before them, to confirm their

faith, their creed, and to show them that He is indeed

divine, and not just human.

As Christians, there is a reason we say we believe in

Jesus Christ. We say it a lot. Because in that simple

phrase, we say that we believe that Jesus is more than just

the man named Yehoshuah that lived for about 33 years and was

crucified on a hill outside Jerusalem 2000 years ago.

This is extremely important. Today it is fashionable

in academic circles to say that we are on a quest for the

historical Jesus. There is a great desire to know as

accurately as possible who the man Jesus was: to learn as

much as possible from history and archaeology and

linguistics and all the tools of scholarship who Jesus was.

And, as far as it goes, there is nothing wrong with the

quest for the historical Jesus. It shows just how much

Jesus is an important figure for everyone on the planet.

Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and even atheists:

they all believe in Jesus, if by that you mean they believe

that a man by that name probably lived in what we call first

century Palestine and taught some good moral codes and lived

a good life and inspired many people and all that.

But as Christians, when we say, I believe in Jesus Christ,

that’s not what we are saying. We go far beyond the quest

for the historical Jesus, far beyond merely affirming that

someone really interesting and important by that name lived

a long time ago. Why? Because Jesus is alive. Because He

rose from the dead. And we, by our baptism, are submerged

into His Passion, Death and Resurrection, so we can say that

Jesus is the Christ, the Son of a God who is by no means

dead, but is alive. And He is our Life. He is our Way and

He is our Truth.

If you are a Christian, there is no getting around the

fact that the historical Jesus is also the Lord of Glory,

who sits at the right hand of the Father. If you are a

Christian, that is why we do not say or hear the name of

Jesus and act like it is just the same as saying or hearing

the name of Bob or Sue or Billy or Patty. At the name of Jesus,

every knee shall bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every

tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father; Paul

writes in Philippians 1.10. That’s why the priest takes off

his biretta and the people all bow their heads when the

Sacred Name of Jesus is said during Mass. That’s why to use

the Name of Jesus in vain is a sacrilege and a blasphemy

that cries out for reparation, but it is the Name and the

Mission of God Himself. That’s why, even though as

Christians we recognise that there are seeds in truth in

every religion and we are tolerant and respectful of

everyone’s beliefs, we still reach out to everyone to share

the good news that this Jesus IS the Lord of Glory, and not

just an historical figure of the past. That’s why, as

Catholics, we seek the bring all who call Jesus Savior into

communion with and under Peter, the first disciple who

confessed Jesus is Lord in the midst of the Church, a Church

which isn’t just a matter of the heart, but a visible

institution of flesh and blood and spirit that dwells in

communion with Jesus and the Successors to the Apostles.

That’s why as Catholics, we call all of those who gave their

lives rather than deny that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of

the Living God, as martyrs and celebrate their deaths, not

as tragedies, but as triumphs of the true faith and true

love.

When you hear the name of Jesus, don’t take it for

granted. Bow your head in respect. Stop using the name of

God in vain. Make reparation by prayer and sacrifice for

those who do use the Holy Name in vain. Remember that when

you say the Creed, Jesus is asking you, “Who do you say that

I am?” And think about your response. Do you think that He

is like John the Baptist, or Elijah, or the prophets of old?

Do you think He is a great and powerful man of the past,

like Buddha, or Muhammad, or Gandhi? Or can you say “I

believe in Jesus Christ”? Do you mean by that simple

phrase, that Jesus is not just an historical figure of the

past, but the Lord of Glory? Is He your Savior, your

Redeemer, your King? Because if He is not, do not commit

the sacrilege of saying the words of the Creed with your

lips if the Word, Jesus Christ, is not the Word of your

heart.

Yet if you do believe, along with Peter, along with the

whole Catholic Church throughout the ages, that Jesus is the

Christ, the Son of the Living God, then say those words like

they are the most important words that you will every say in

your life. Live those words. Love those words.

How sweet the Name of Jesus soundsin a believer's ear!It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,and drives away his fear.

It makes the wounded spirit whole,and calms the troubled breast;'tis manna to the hungry soul,and to the weary, rest.

Dear Name, the rock on which I build,my shield and hiding-place,my never-failing treasury, filled with boundless stores of grace!

Jesus! my Shepherd, Brother, Friend,my Prophet, Priest and King,my Lord, my Life, my Way, my End,accept the praise I bring.

Weak is the effort of my heart,and cold my warmest thought;but when I see thee as thou art,I'll praise thee as I ought.

Till then I would thy love proclaimwith every fleeting breath;and may the music of thy Namerefresh my soul in death!

6. and in Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our LORD

When we start talking about Fathers and Sons, it is easy to

think that, when we apply those terms to God, it’s just some

kind of fuzzy metaphor that, when you think about it,

doesn’t work very well. I mean, God is spirit right, so how

can you say that God is male or female like your tomcat at

home or your youngest daughter off at university is male or

female? Then it gets weirder when you start saying that God

is one substance in three persons. Christian theology has

been tackling that one for years, and the most we can say is

that we cannot say certain things, like each one of the

persons of the Holy Trinity is like a different face of God.

One ecumenical council of the Church after another has

condemned as heresies different ways to explain, or explain

away, the Trinity.

It’s the same thing for Jesus, who rather complicates

matters too. It was easy enough to say that God was Father

in a metaphorical sense, when God was just a spirit and one

person, and entirely different when a man named Yehoshua

started to say, The Father and I are one (John 10.30). In fact,

as soon as he said it, we are told, the Jews picked up

stones to execute Him for blasphemy.

So what does it all mean, for Jesus to be one with the

Father and yet different? He is called the Son of God, but

how is that any different than how you and I are sons and

daughters of God? It’s just an image, a symbol right?

Well, not exactly. Here is one of these places where

in theology we reason backwards to get at the meaning of

something. We know that Jesus is a real human being, a man

with everything that it means to be a male of the human

species. But our faith, revealed as it is by God, says that

He is also the Incarnate Word of God, the Second Person of

the Blessed Trinity, and also that believers in God’s

revelation should be baptized in the name of the Father, and

of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. That’s weird: in one

Name, but there are three of them. It’s enough to make your

head hurt.

So how do we explain that Jesus is the Son of God, and

is also God? And what does it mean for Him to be the Son of

God? If you haven’t really thought about it a lot, then

well, you need to. Paul writes the Corinthians very bluntly

in his first letter to them, chapter 15 verse 14: If Christ has

not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. If

Christ is just a man, then everything we are doing right now

is pretty stupid when you think about it. If Christ is God,

it is the most important thing in the world. The

Resurrection of Christ is the crowning moment of all of the

episodes in the life of Jesus which show Him to be Divine as

well as Human, and that His words, namely that He and the

Father are one, are true. So then we start to explain that

along with the Holy Spirit the Father and the Son send

forth.

We read in the Gospel and the Epistles of John, God is

Love. Everything that we can think about God, that He is the

superlative of everything: all-powerful, all-knowing, all

that, means that in Him there is no possibility, no

contingency, no corruption: the philosophers call Him Pure

Act. That is not a theological category, that is one that

reason comes to: the Unmoved Mover, the thing that gets it

all started, that Christian Faith calls Abba, Father. But Pure

Act could just be all totally happy by Himself doing His

thing, or being who He is, up in Heaven. But His essence is

Love. And you and I all know that song, Love isn’t love til you give

it away. (you never knew Rogers and Hammerstein was a

theological source of knowledge, did you?) But God can’t

give away who He is. So St Augustine reflected on all this

and posited that the Father, God, in reflecting upon His own

self, from all eternity generates another Person who shares

His entire essence of Love. Love is entirely communicated

infinitely not in one, but in two, because it is in the

nature of Love to give, and God can only give infinitely and

entirely. So Love generates Love, and the Love between the

first and the second, the Love between the Father and the

Son, is so great, it spirates another Person, the Spirit.

So there is this essential structure of three that

comes from the Pure Act of Loving: Lover, Loved, and the

Loving. But that generation: you know, God from God, Light from

Light, True God from True God, begotten not made, starts with that

which generates, which comes forth, you know, a Father. And

what is generated, or rather who, is the perfect image of

the Father, the Son. He is not a Son in the natural way, we

might say, but He is Son nonetheless. And so this Trinity

of Persons reveals this inner structure, these relations, by

revealing the names of the Trinity in the context of Jesus’

Great Commission, Go ye forth and teach all nations, baptizing them in the

name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Here is where we really see that the God revealed by

Christian Faith is really a very different God than that

worshipped by other religions. For the Jews, God is one and

God is God, and I am not, and that’s really all there is to

know. Idem for Islam, which means submission to this God in

Arabic. For the pagan Greeks and Romans, and for alot of

heathens running around today too, there may be a God, but

He is not in relation to any of us, much less as a Father to

beloved children.

It is important to realize that, for the right-

believing Christian, Jesus did not become the Son of God at

some point in time. He did not become the Son of God at the

incarnation, or at His baptism, or at the resurrection. He

always was the Son of God, the first begotten, not in the

sense of there were others, but in the primal, in a sense

natural to God. But that relationship of Father to Son is a

relationship of Love, and if Love is always giving itself,

God communicates that Love to the apex of His creation,

humankind, how? By making us, adopted Sons and Daughters.

We are not outside the family of God, even though when He

communicates His love to us, for us it is super-natural,

above our human nature.

During Lent, I proposed for your spiritual reading

Columba Marmion’s Christ, tbe Life of the Soul. It’s a mammoth book,

and might have scared some of you by its length. But

Marmion’s central spiritual doctrine is pretty easy to

grasp. God loves us so much He wants to be in relation to

us as a Father. By Baptism, by that immersion into the

Redeeming Work of His Son, we become Sons and Daughters of

God. We are given a heavenly inheritance because we are

invited by faith to share in the very love of God. Our

humanity is so transformed that the Greek Fathers of

antiquity spoke of man’s divinization like Christ. When

Adam and Eve sinned, they were thrown out of Paradise

because they tried to be be like God by eating of the fruit

of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. With Christ, by

the wood of the Cross God makes us like Him.

That’s the real stumbling block between Christianity

and all the other religions of the world. 1 Corinthians

1.23, We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the

Greeks, but to those who are called, the power and wisdom of God. There

isn’t just a God out there who does His thing all by His

lonesome in His own perfection: He has made us by Jesus

Christ His Sons and Daughters too. That is your greatest

glory, and the greatest glory of our Faith, that you are

loved so much that you are the very sons and daughters of

God. Never forget that!

7. who was conceived by the Holy Spirit

They say that you can choose your friends, you can choose

your work, but you can’t choose your family. When you think

about it, every time a married couple opens their covenant

to life, they are making an act of faith. Will their love

bear fruit in a beautiful child who will bring them and

everyone around them joy, or will that child grow up to be

that problem child, the black sheep of the family that is

always causing them heartache and sleepless nights? When

they open themselves to life, they aren’t usually thinking

of that, but it is still there.

The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, however,

didn’t choose his family, either, in one sense. Last week

we talked about how the three persons of the Trinity are in

relation to each other as Father (Lover), Son (Loved) and

Spirit (Loving). The Trinity is in a very real sense a

family, and by the Sacrament of Baptism, we become adopted,

but nonetheless real, members of the Divine Family. Yet, we

also spent a lot of time last week talking about how

orthodox Christian faith affirms that the Son also became a

real human being, a divine person taking on a human nature,

without confusing the two or divesting Himself of one or the

other. He is a man like us in everything, as Hebrews 4.15

so elegantly puts it, We do not have a high priest who is unable to

sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted

as we are, yet without sin. The Scriptures tell us that He is like

us in everything but sin. But there is one more way He is

different than us, which the Bible does not directly say.

Unlike us, who do not choose our family, the Son, the

Eternal Word of God, did choose to be part of a singular

family unit.

Being the Son of God, the Father was His Father, but in

order to become man, He chose to be born, as we all are, of

a woman. Being God, He had perfect knowledge of all things,

and so He chose Mary, out of all the women who ever have and

ever will lived, to be His Mother: not because she was

worthy on her own, but because He could foresee that, when

the Plan of Salvation and her part in it would be revealed,

she would sing with joy, Be it done unto me according to Thy Word.

And it was done unto herm not in any old way, but quite

literally, according to the Word of God, and the Word of

God, uttered from all eternity from the Father, in the

fullness of time, as Galatians 4,4 tells us, was conceived

by the power of the Spirit in the womb of Mary.

The child of this singular union between a Divine

Father and a human Mother, was Yehoshuah, whose name means

“God saves.” He was Emmanuel, God with us. In the moment

of the Incarnation, everything would change for sinful man.

He would still be man, He will still bear the mark of the

Ancient Curse of Adam and Eve, but God would no longer be a

Presence revealed only in the Law behind the veil of the

Holy of Holies in the Temple, or within the Shekinah Glory

Cloud that accompanied the Israelites on their journey

through the desert to the Promised Land.

Mary, a human mother, became the Ark of a New Covenant,

a new Tabernacle where God would dwell among us, and where

God would be born as a child with a human face. A face that

would be gazed upon with love by the Blessed Mother and St

Joseph, His fosterfather, a face that would be spat upon and

crowned with thorns, a face that would be wiped by Veronica

on the way to Calvary, a face that would proclaim God’s Love

to us all forever.

This is how God chose to pitch His tent among us, by

choosing Mary and Joseph. And in choosing this human

family, He did something to the nature of family. Family

was no longer to be just a random occasional grouping of

people by their own choice. Jesus would make the family,

and elevate it to a place of the Divine Presence. In

choosing His human family, He made us all a part of His

family and gave us Mary as Mother and Joseph as Guardian to

all who are baptized in His life.

Jesus elected to be conceived in Mary by the power of

the Spirit. How can this be? Mary asked. It is a question

that goes beyond the fact that Mary was a virgin and hence

could not have a child. It is a question that opens to

faith in the Divine Action, where Mary, the first disciple,

seeks to know God, and in response, she is told in Luke

1.35: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will

overshadow you, therefore the child to be born will be called Holy, the Son of

God.

Now, of course, our own day and age finds all of this

to be the most unbelievable part of the Christian message.

Everyone is able to accept a message of peace and love.

Everyone is able to believe in Jesus as a moral teacher and

virtuous man. But it is this article of the Creed that

separates the Christian from all others. Now, of course,

there are those who try to explain this away as a myth and a

symbol.

They say that this myth of the incarnation is a motif

that runs through all kinds of different religions. In

Hinduism, the god Vishnu becomes incarnate in many ways,

most notale through Krishna. In ancient Egypt, Horus was

born of the goddess Isis. Apollo, Theseus, Dionysus and

Persephone, were all born of unions between gods or

goddesses and men and women. Huitzlipotchli was

miraculously conceived, in Aztec mythology, by feathers left

behind by God and a human mother.

The history of religions provides ample evidence of

stories of such conceptions and births. Based on that,

there are two schools of thought which have gained a lot of

currency in today’s world. 1. the story of the Incarnation

of Jesus is just another example of this type of myth, hence

Jesus is not God at all. 2. the way in which the conception

and birth of Jesus has been communicated to the world was

influenced by paganism, and hence we have to purge the

message of anything that is “foreign” to the story to get

back to the historical Jesus that is the only one we can say

anything about. The first school ends up in atheism, and

the second in liberalism and Modernism. And there are

numerous people, even those who claim to be Christians, who

have accepted one or another account of Jesus that basically

comes down to this: it’s all a story, and not much more.

Now, today we do not have the time to examine all of

these other accounts and show you how the account of Jesus

is different. They may be similar, there may be analogies,

but they are definitely not the same. Pope Benedict XVI in

the second volume of his work Jesus of Nazareth has a

fascinating discussion about all that, and I encourage you

to read it. Here, though, I have one thought for you to

take with you on your way.

The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Word was

made flesh when the Son chose a human family to be His

family, and in doing so, consecrates all human families,

making them all vehicle in creation of the divine presence.

Families have a vocation to be love in the midst of the

world, and thereby point to God who is Love. Whatever

similarities there may be between the account of the

Incarnation in Scripture and Tradition and the myths of

antiquity, one thing remains. Jesus Christ was a real

historical person, a real man, but much more than that: the

Son of the Carpenter, the Galilean, who taught and preached

and performed miracles, is the Lord of Glory who sits at the

right hand of the Father. And to Him be all glory and Honor

and worship, now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

8. born of the Virgin Mary

When I first came to Prince of Peace, I asked when our

patronal feast was. Msgr Brovey informed, “Well, it’s

Christmas.” So much for another excuse for a big Mass and

party. We are always so concerned about Christmas that we

can forget that our parish family was put under the

patronage of the Prince of Peace. There is a reason why

Bishop Unterkoefler, in 1974, chose this title of Our Lord.

On the one hand, I think there were very few places named

that before Vatican II; it was a title that didn’t catch on,

but in the 1970s they started popping up all over the place.

To name a new parish community Prince of Peace was cutting

edge at the the time, it indicated forward thinking,

progressive, and new.

But it was also the time of the Vietnam War. I wasn’t

alive then, so I have no idea what it must have been like to

go through that endless conflict. But many of the young men

and women who went off to that war had parents and

grandparents who remembered World War I, World II and Korea.

And in a place like Greenville, South Carolina, the memory

of the Recent Unpleasantness, or the War of Northern

Aggression, was more than a memory; it was a living reality.

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, the Civil Rights

Movement for racial equality, all of these struggles were

still very alive to the founders of our parish. And so the

Catholic Church was to be a beacon for something in the

midst of all the chaos. In a world marked by so much war

and strife, in the 20th century which had seen so much

violence on a global scale, there was a great need for a

place of peace.

The Church herself, particularly in the persons of Pope

John XXIII and Paul VI, cried out for peace. They were also

confident that, despite it all, man wanted peace and order

and tranquility, and that the Church could be a powerful

instrument in constructing a more just and a more perfect

society where men and women could be free and live in peace

with each other and with God.

Now, there are some for whom the teaching of the Popes

was just liberal utopian claptrap. They thought that the

social teaching of the Church was just a ruse to inject

left-wing ideology into the temple of God. Now of course,

it must be said, for some people it was. There were people

who embraced the social justice vision of the Church but

left behind the imperative of evangelization and mission.

They adopted a position of religious indifferentism, that

all religions are equal, and that it does not matter what

you believe. They saw the Sacred Liturgy, the celebration

of the Sacraments, and the traditional catechism as

outdated, relics of a bygone age. And so little by little

they became indistinguishable from the rest of Americans,

and Catholic identity suffered. The Catholic “difference”

didn’t matter to them anymore, and thousands upon thousands

of Catholics left the practice of the faith, or they stayed

while adopting a position of hatred and dissent against the

Pope and the Bishops who urged them to remain faithful to

the Church of all times, and not jsut the Church of what’s

happening now. Thousands of priests and nuns abandoned

their vows, and seminaries and convents, and the Church

found herself in such a crisis that, in 1968, Pope Paul VI

declared, “the smoke of Satan has entered the very temple of

God.”

But the social teaching of the Church, the imperative

to work for peace and justice, is not negotiable. It is

just as much a part of the Church as the doctrine of the

divinity of Christ or the seven sacraments. All Catholics

are bound in conscience to work towards a better world for

everyone just as much as they are bound to go to Mass every

Sunday and holy day. It is not an either-or proposition,

but a both-and, like so many other parts of our faith. That

is why I cringe when I hear people label themselves as

liberal or conservative Catholics , social justice or

traditional Catholics, or any other adjective except maybe

Roman. It’s all a part of our faith.

So why, then, is the social teaching of the Church not

just a spiritual version of humanitarianism? Why is it not

just a bunch of people who like to do good to others? After

all, many Protestants seriously charge that the reason

Catholics go around doing all these good works all the time

is because we think that by them we can earn our way into

heaven, when the Bible says we are saved by faith alone.

Are they right? Why do Catholics place so much emphasis on

feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving drink to the

thirsty? Why do we start hospitals and schools and

orphanages and why do we stand in picket lines protesting

abortion and the erosion of religious liberty?

The short answer is that we believe what the Bible says

in James 2.26, Faith without works is dead. If our faith does not

translate into action in the world, it is not alive, it is

not capable of changing hearts and transforming lives.

But there is another, more fundamental reason: what we

say in the Creed: Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. Up

until now, everything we have talked about in our series on

the Creed has been geared towards understanding who God is.

And our faith teaches us that God became one of us; the

Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus Christ, became a

little child in the wonder of Christmas.

This great mystery is what theologians call the

Incarnation: literally, the enfleshment of God as man. And

because God became man, Christ could redeem all of humanity.

Now, we now that there are those who reject that gift of

salvation, so the redemption is not effective in them, but

Jesus saved us all. Because God was born of the Virgin

Mary, humanity is no longer a mass of damned souls, but

capax Dei: capable of divinization, of union with God. We

see the reflection of God in every single human being, from

womb to tomb, because the Christ Child had a human face, and

allowed us to see for the first time the image of God.

Small wonder, then, that St Irenaeus said that the glory of

God is living man. A man who is alive in Christ glorifies

God. And we help a man to be alive by taking care of the

whole man: body and soul.

The social teaching of the Church is not “We Catholics

do good stuff because we are good people.” The social

teaching of the Church is this: We Catholic do good stuff

because God is so good that He became one of us, and the

image of God can be seen in every man, woman and child. And

it is because of the Incarnation that man bears the image of

God, and in a special way through Baptism, that we must

treat all human life with the utmost care and reverence.

For when we sin against man, we sin against the God whose

image can be discerned in Him.

This is no kind of vaguely liberal political ideal, it

is the truth of the Gospel. It is because Jesus was born of

Mary that all human life is sacred, and in it we see the

power and the presence of God. And when there is anything

which detracts from human dignity, we seek to do everyhting

in our power to rectify the situation, because in doing so

we give glory to God. There are some religions for whom, if

you are sick and suffering and dying, it’s because you

deserve it. For us, all of that is the sad consequence of

sin. And no matter why you are sick and suffering and

dying, whether it is your fault or the fault of others, it

doesn’t matter. For the Christian, the image of God is

alive in every man. The traces and the shadows of the image

of God found in every man by creation are made clear and

manifest when we become adopted children of God by baptism.

And as children of God, we give the highest glory to the

Prince of Peace by being instruments of God’s peace to the

world.

Always remember your dignity, and that of everyone.

Because of the Incarnation, because the Word took on flesh,

because Love came down at Christmas, every human being is

loved infinitely. We who are marked with that Love by

faith, in loving others, participate in what is means to be

the God who is Love.

9. suffered under Pontius Pilate

When you hear the word passion nowadays, it is easy to think

of one of two things: 1) you are really excited or

enthusiastic about something, like people who have a passion

for jazz music because they go to jazz festivals all over

the world and have their Ipod full of days worth of jazz

music. 2) the vehement feeling that two people have towards

each other, like when a man and woman in the covenant of

marriage feel very passionate about each other. We rarely

think that the word passion means anything else. So when on

Palm Sunday and Good Friday we read the Passion Gospels,

it’s sometimes hard to understand what that means. But the

Latin word passio comes from a Greek root which means “to

suffer.”

Last week we talked about the mystery of the

Incarnation of Christ, the enfleshment of God as Man. This

week we move on to that other great mystery of the Faith,

the Passion of Christ, the suffering and death of the God-

Man, Jesus Christ. That mystery of how the Son of God could

die and rise again, which is something human reason finds

very difficult to come terms with, in turn reveals the other

fundamental doctrine of the Faith, the Atonement. This

doctrine of the Atonement seeks to answer the question, Why

did Jesus die? Why did He have to die to save us from our sins (salvation), allow

us friendship with Him (redemption), and union with Him (divnization)?

The mystery is why Jesus had to suffer under Pontius

Pilate, die and be buried in order to accomplish all these

things. We could quite easily say, “If God is all-powerful

and He wanted to free us from our sins and save us, why

couldn’t He just decree it, wave a magic wand and make it

happen? Why would the Father watch as His Only Son was

tortured and died on the Cross?” If the Incarnation is the

most unbelievable part of the Christian mystery, the Passion

is perhaps the most disturbing. It raises some very serious

questions about God the Father, and there are many people,

looking at Jesus on the Cross, allowed to hang there and

suffer by the will of the Father, and they say, “What kind

of a God is this? How can that be reconciled with a God who

is supposed to be Love?”

So we have to answer the question: Why did Jesus have to die

for us? Theologians have posited several ways of answering

why by several theories of the atonement, but there are two

large schools of thought which are the most influential in

Christian history.

1. The first considers atonement as at-one-ment: Out of

love, Jesus wanted to identify with man in all things, in

all of the sickness, suffering and death that was the

consequence of freely chosen sin. Remember when we studied

a few weeks ago Hebrews 4.15: For we do not have a high priest who is

unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been

tempted as we are, yet without sin. Jesus becomes radically

identified with us in everything, and in doing so, inspires

us to conform our life to His in every way, and in doing so,

we find freedom through the following of His Way in the life

of virtue and faith.

2. The second considers atonement in terms of satisfaction

and substitution. When Adam sinned, we all sinned with Him,

and because the one against whom we sinned, God, is

infinite, the debt we contracted was also infinite, and thus

we were in no position to pay that debt. According to this

school of thought, God the Father was due in justice, and

His Son alone could pay the debt. Out of Love, the Son

offered Himself up as a victim to the Father in our place,

substituting Himself for us and thus ransoming our debt.

Jesus was the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah 53: He

has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows . . . He was oppressed and he was

afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth . . . He was cut off fron the land of the

living, stricken for the transgression of the people . . . Yet it was the will of the

Lord to crush Him, He has put Him to grief, when His soul makes an offering for

guilt, out of the anguish of His soul he shall see and be satisifed.

The first school was common in the age of the early

Church Fathers and is preferred in both the East today and

by many modern theologians. The second gained currency in

the High Middle Ages and was very influential up until the

second half of the 20 the century.

So what does the Catholic Church officially teach,

then, about the Atonement? In the Catechism of the Catholic Church

615-616 we see both schools integrated in one statement of

what the Church views of the atonement:

"For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by one

man's obedience many will be made righteous." By his obedience unto

death, Jesus accomplished the substitution of the suffering Servant, who

"makes himself an offering for sin", when "he bore the sin of many", and

who "shall make many to be accounted righteous", for "he shall bear their

iniquities". Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins

to the Father.445

It is love "to the end" that confers on Christ's sacrifice its value as

redemption and reparation, as atonement and satisfaction. He knew and

loved us all when he offered his life. Now "the love of Christ controls us,

because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have

died." No man, not even the holiest, was ever able to take on himself the

sins of all men and offer himself as a sacrifice for all. The existence in

Christ of the divine person of the Son, who at once surpasses and

embraces all human persons, and constitutes himself as the Head of all

mankind, makes possible his redemptive sacrifice for all.

The Church admirably balances both schools in this statement

of her teaching. We do not believe in this vengeful hateful

God the Father who demanded the death of His Son as payment

for our sins, but the debt having been incurred by us, Jesus

offered Himself up, because He willed it, out of Love to

redeem us all.

The fact that it was part of the Father’s plan for His

Son to suffer to atone for the sins of mere mortal creatures

is perhaps the one dogma of the Christian religion that

sticks in the craw of modern man more than anything else.

It goes against everything we think we know about what it

means to be a Father, to be loving and to be forgiving.

Yet, the atoning passion and death of Christ is a radical

revelation of the depths of God’s love. God loves us so

much to create us, but He also loves us so much to give us

our freedom, even if we misuse that freedom to reject Him.

But when we also use that freedom to cry out, Lord Jesus Christ,

have mercy on me, a sinner, when we transform our freedom into an

act of worship of the Triune God, He does not turn His back

on us. He gives us His most precious treasure, Himself, the

Son offers Himself up to the Father because He willed it. We are

more than just forgiven. We are more than just blessed and

highly favoured. When Jesus suffered and died under Pontius

Pilate, the doors to paradise were flung once more open to

us, not for us to gaze from without at a marvelous spectacle

of Divine Majesty. The doors were flung wide, to enter with

joy and accept the gift of participating in God’s inner

life. In the words of Paul to the Ephesians 2.19-22: So then

you are no longer stramgers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the

saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of

apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone . . . In Him, you

also are being built together into a dwelling place for God.

10. was crucified, died and was buried

“Why do Catholics put the Cross up there with Jesus still

hanging on it? Don’t they know Jesus is alive, and risen

from the dead?” If I had a dollar for every time I have

heard that question, I would be a rich man. It’s one of

those questions that, when we Catholics hear it, we just

facepalm and think, “Really? Come to the Easter Vigil where

we have church for hours after hours at night and tell me

that Catholics don’t believe in the Resurrection!” It is

true, though, that wherever Catholics are to be found, you

are going to find the image of the Crucified: on the altar,

on the walls of schoolrooms, around necks, even on tattooed

backs!

In the early Church, Christians were persecuted, so

they came up with a complex level of symbolism to indicate

the places where Christians worshipped. There’s the famous

Jesus fish, because the word fish in Greek, icthos, can be an

acrostic for the first letters of the phrase, Jesus, Son of God,

Savior. Then there is the Chi-Rho, that monogram that looks

like a P over an X, and which is the first two letters of

Christ in Greek. As soon as Christianity became legal, and

we started building all these huge churches, huge glorious

crosses were put in the apse behind the altar. The altar,

made of stone, was more than just a table to put bread and

wine upon. It evoked not only the table of the Last Supper,

but the stone on which Jesus was laid in the tomb. As

Christians became more cognizant of just how the Mass they

celebrated every Sunday was a re-presentation, in unbloody

manner, of the bloody sacrifice of Calvary, the Cross and

the Altar became unified. And so, little by little, artists

began to portray the figure of the dead Christ upon the

Cross as the central image in the church.

Even today, most people think there has to be a

Crucifix in a Catholic church somewhere, or it jsut doesn’t

seem right. After Vatican II, there were people who said

that the Mass was not a sacrifice, but a meal, and so they

took the Cross off the altar, away from the center, and then

put the priest behind the altar in the center. And you know

what happens whenever you put a man in the center of

anything, and so in many places the Mass began to be

monopolized by the personality of the priest. Pope Benedict

XVI saw this situation and reminded us that the center of

the Mass is not the priest, or the worhsipping community,

but Christ. That is why he encouraged us to celebrate Mass,

not with the priest on the back side of the altar and the

people on the other, but with priest and people together

facing the Cross on the altar. And he said, where that was

not feasible, a large cross should be on the altar, not to

block the view of the faithful, but to remind us that the

Mass is not about people seeing what is going on with bread

and wine, but in worshipping the Christ whose Sacrifice is

made present on the altars of our churches.

So the reason the body of Jesus is on the Cross is not

because we can’t have just a plain cross, but because it is

a visible reminder of the connection between the Altar of

Sacrifice in our churches and the Altar of Sacrifice which

was the Cross of Calvary. But we do have unadorned Crosses

sometimes. On Good Friday, a plain wooden cross veiled in

red is processed into church and unveiled progressively,

with the priest singing three times at a successively higher

pitch, “Behold the wood of the cross, on which hung the

savior of the world!” And the people sing, “Come let us

worship!” On Good Friday, everyone comes up and kneels,

falls down in adoration, before, not a piece of wood, but

the Christ who gave His life in the ultimate sacrifice. For

most of Church history, the clergy would take off their

shoes and creep to the Cross with bare feet. It’s no longer

required, but we do it here. Just as Moses was bidden by

God to take off his shoes at the burning bush because he was

standing on holy ground, the Church’s tradition prescribes

the same thing to her ministers before another tree of life

which burns but is not consumed.

In many Latin countries, a statue of the Body of Jesus,

and in the East, a burial shroud, is processed around the

church on Good Friday night in a mock burial service of the

Dead Christ, and the image of the Dead Christ is placed in a

kind of tomb, awaiting Easter morn, when it will be found

empty. Now, all of these are little “t” traditions, as it

were; none of them are of the essence of the faith, but they

have organically grown up in the Church’s prayer life.

There are many people who will tell you flat out that

they are uncomfortable with the fact that, when we go to

church, there is a corpse nailed to a tree which is

everywhere you can look. Even some Catholics have said, “St

Augustine once wrote, We are an Easter people, and Alleluia

is our song!, so is all of this not kind of scary and

macabre, a relic of a bygone age?” Well, we are an Easter

people, and Alleluia is our song (except during the

penitential season of Lent, of course!), but the reason for

the images of the dead and buried Christ is not to depress

us. It is a constant reminder that the ultimate sacrifice

was offered, the highest ransom was paid, for each one of

us. Jesus died for me, and because He died for me, I can

live, and live forever. When I am tempted to choose sin,

and go back towards the jaws of death and hell from which I

was freed, the lifeless body of the God-Man stands before

us. The words of Isaish 65.2,5 ring in our ears, I spread out

my hands all the day to a rebellious people, who walk in a way that is not good,

following their own devices . . . who say, “Keep to yourself, do not come near Me.”

And continuing in verses 17, 19: For behold, I create new heavens

and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered, or come into

mind . . I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and be gald in My people, no more shall be

heard in it the sound of weeping, and the cry of dsitress.

Jesus told us in the Beatitudes, Blessed are they that mourn,

for they shall be comforted. If we cannot feel sadness sometimes,

we have no heart, we have no feelings, and what kind of a

man are we. We have to be able to mourn the ways in which

we have failed Love, and rejected God. We have to be able

to mourn the fact that there is death and suffering and

violence and war in the world. It’s not all rainbows and

sunshine all the time. If we fail to mourn, then we also

fail to love. And we get so caught up in ourselves that we

fail to be moved to compassion. The image of the Conqueror

King, dead and buried, if it does not move us in the depths

of our being, move us to love and to compassion, then it is

no fault of God. It is because our hearts are hardened by

sin, and we have forgotten how to love. Because behind the

body of the Lord is also the glorious Cross, which reminds

us also that death is not the final answer. The Body of

Christ that we receive from the Altar at Mass is not a

symbol of a dead body from the past, but the living Body and

Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ. It is the food of

immortality, it is that which gives us union with God. The

Cross is not a sad symbol of torture of evil Romans from

ages past. The Cross is the threshold between heaven and

earth. It is by and through the Cross that we see Love

conquer Death, and Good triumph over evil. And if you have

yet to see that in your life, then maybe you need to take a

much closer look.

11. He descended into hell

Doctrine is what God reveals to us through Scripture and

Tradition about what we must be believe and how we must

live. Theology tries to explain how this is so, and how the

various doctrines all fit together. And catechesis tries to

take the insights of theology to help teach doctrine in ways

appropriate to different ages, cultures or groups. In

theory, doctrine, theology and catechesis should all be part

of a harmonous whole. But sometimes it doesn’t always work

out that way. Add in what some of the saints thought, and

then what everyone from your pious grandmother to your

heathen coworker thinks, and it can all get terribly

confusing really fast. And there is nowhere more the case

than when it comes to the afterlife. Judgment, heaven,

hell, purgatory, limbo: start talking about these things and

it won’t take long to realize that, even among educated

Catholics, there can be a lot of confusion about what it all

really means.

Scripture and the Magisterium of the Church are pretty

reserved when it comes to talking about the afterlife.

There is not a lot of useless speculation about these

ultimate realities. Theologians, though, love thinking

about all these questions and trying to answer them: there

is an entire branch of theology called eschatology which

studies them. And when you filter all that through Dante,

Dan Brown, and what the second grade nun taught you in First

Communion class, what most of us think these ultimate

realities are like bears little or no resemblance at all to

the teaching of Christ and His Church.

In the Creed we say that Jesus descended into hell.

Now, the Gospel writers who recount the events of the

Passion do not state that He did so. They recount that He

died and was buried, and then that He was raised. So what

happened between the moment in which Jesus cried out, “It is

finished!” and breathed his last and then appeared to Mary

Magdalene, the other Mary and Salome, and said, “Peace be

with you”? Acts 3.15 tells us that God raised Jesus from

the dead. 1 Peter 3.18-20 explains, For Christ also died for sins

once and for all . . . that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh

but alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who

formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited.

What an amazing passage! Even though it was not God’s

plan for us to sin and merit eternal punishment, He waited

until what Galatians 4.4 calls “the fullness of time” for

the Incarnation and the Passion. The body of Jesus lay dead

in the tomb, and in doing so God Himself identified with us

even in the punishment of sin by death, He who knew no sin.

But while His body lay in the tomb, His soul was very much

alive. Peter tells us “He preached to the spirits in

prison.” All of the just of old, the patriarchs and

prophets and righteous men and women of old, were humans in

the line of Adam and Eve; they had contracted original sin,

and been marked with the Ancient Curse. But many of them

sought to serve the Lord as best as they could under the

Law. But the Law could not save them. Only God could save

them. And with the Passion, God could, and did save them,

those who were born and died before the coming of God as

Man. So all of the spirits of the Just languished. As

spirits, they were immortal, but yet they could not

possession eternal communion with God, because the ransom

for their souls had not been paid.

And so it came to pass that what Jesus had prophesied

in John 5.25, 29: I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the

dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, those who hear will live . . . and come

forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have

done evil, to the resurrection of judgment. So where were the Just if

Heaven were not yet open to them? They waited for a Savior,

and God patiently waited for them to hear the voice of that

Savior, who went to preach to them whose bodies were dead

while His body was dead, preach to them in that place where

God has been absent. The Scriptures use the word Sheol to

describe this place, this state. We translate it as hell.

But this hell is not the hell we think of when we do our

catechism class and we learn that hell is the place where

people go when they have died in unrepented mortal sin, that

place of the eternal absence of God. This hell was called

the limbo of the fathers or the limbo of the Just in the

Ancient Church, limbo coming from a Latin word meaning

border, because they were on the border between the hell of

the damned and the heaven of the blessed.

But it might be easy for us to think that Jesus just

went to preach to the souls of those who had died before He

came, that it has nothing to do with us. But God is outside

of space and time, and so it was then that He procured the

victory for us ovvr death, a victory that will be ours in

our time when we persevere until death in grace that we

might have life. That is why the Middle Ages referred to

this time as the Harrowing of Hell, and developed this

fantastic imagery of it as a time of battle in which Satan

was vanquished, the fruits of which we would receive in our

time. It is also why Holy Saturday is a day of silence and

waiting in the church.

One of the oldest homilies still in existence was

preached on Holy Saturday and reads, “Today a great silence reigns

on earth, a great silence and a great stillness. A great silence because the King is

asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh

and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. . . He has

gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to

visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free

from sorrow Adam in his bonds and Eve, captive with him - He who is both their

God and the son of Eve. . . "I am your God, who for your sake have become your

son. . . I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be a prisoner in

hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead.”

Jesus descends to hell, not to free those who have

freely chosen it, but to break the bonds of those who would

repent of their sin and choose God and His grace, so that

hell would not be their final destination. The Victor King

is the same that speaks to John in Revelation 1.17-18: Fear

not, I am the First and the Last, and the Living One, I died, and behold, I am alive

forevermore, amd I have the keys of death and Hades.

When we say in the Creed that Jesus descended into

hell, it is not some kind of nice theological image. It is

not just some statement of what might have happened between

Jesus’ Death and Resurrection. It is one of the most

precious statements that a Christian believer can say,

because in those simple words, we recognize a simple truth.

We are sinners, every one of us, and we deserve the eternal

punishment of hell. But God is patient, and kind and

merciful. And because we have cried out, Lord Jesus Christ, have

mercy on me, a sinner! He waited during three days of darkness,

when all seemed lost to the world, for Jesus to preach the

Good News all the way from Jerusalem down to the very depths

of hell itself, to free us, and to give us life. These

words of the Creed are the sound of hope and salvation for

each one of us. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15. 51.55:

I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a

moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will

sound, and the dead will be raised, imperishable, and we shall be changed. For

this imperishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature

must put on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where

is thy sting?

12. On the third day he rose again from the dead

Sometimes when I talk to the kids about the three days Jesus

spent in the tomb, the more mathematically inclined among

them note that we commemorate the Death of Jesus on Friday,

and the Easter Vigil starts on Saturday night, and they will

say, “That’s not three days, that’s barely 36 hours!” But

the Ancient World was not quite so exact about their time as

we are, and they tended to attribute a rich symbolism to

numbers of days that we don’t always understand. There are

53 passages in Scripture which refer to a third day, and,

looking at all of them, on the third day, God does something

pretty amazing, a miracle which refers to restoration,

renewal and resurrection.

In John 2.19 Jesus points to Himself and says, Destroy

this temple and in three days I will raise it up. For those who do not know

who Jesus is, it can seem like an awful act of braggadoccio:

I can take this huge building, tear it to the ground and

rebuild it like it was in 72 hours. But for the Jews, it

was a terrible blasphemy. The Temple was the House of God,

the dwelling of His Presence, and the son of a carpenter

from Nazareth is telling them that the Temple is His Body,

and if they kill Him, He will come back to life. Throughout

His public ministry, Jesus continually referred to the fact

that He would suffer, die and rise from the dead. But of

course, the Apostles, who heard these words over and over

again, didn’t grasp their meaning until it seemed all over,

until Mary Magdalene came bursting in to the Upper Room,

crying out, I have seen the Lord! and then they did too.

Each one of the Gospels contains an account of the

Resurrection. Scholars tend to say that Mark is the oldest

of the Gospels, and, in fact verses 9-20 of chapter 16 do

not appear in the oldest manuscripts we have. Some have

made a lot of the fact that John talk about Jesus appearing

first to Mary Magdalene, and don’t mention anyone else,

while Mark mentions Mary the mother of James and Salome, and

Luke mentions Joanna and “some other women”. Even as far

back as the second century, anti-Christian polemicists have

argued that, since the Gospels can’t seem to get their

stories straight, Christians are crazy to believe that the

account is historical.

In fact, throughout history there have been attempts to

discredit the historicity of the bodily Resurrection of

Jesus. They will say that, if the Gospel narrative has

anything to say at all, it is that Resurrection is merely a

symbol of faith: Jesus lives on in the hearts of those who

follow His Way. Yet the teaching authority of the Church,

from Paul in 1 Corinthians to Paul VI in his 1968 Credo of

the People of God, has always thundered against the idea

that the Resurrection was anything other than Jesus being

raised from the dead. People from Ancient Rome like Celsus

to French Enlightement philosophers like Voltaire to the

modern day atheists look at the history of religions and

they just say, “It’s just another myth like Asclepius or

Achilles in Greece.” The fact that every Sunday Christians

throughout the world continue to say, I believe that Jesus, on the

third day, rose from the dead, is exhibit A in an ongoing trial of

Christians for insanity.

Now, apologetics tries to establish that there are

reasons to believe the historical accuracy of the

Resurrection narratives in Scriptures. Pope Benedict XVI in

the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth has an excellent

section on it I encourage you to read. But let me share a

few quotes from him:

What actually happened? Clearly, for the witnesses who encountered the risen

Lord, it was not easy to say. They were confronted with what for them was an

entirely new reality, far beyond the limits of their experience. Much as the reality

of the event overwhelmed them and impelled them to bear witness, it was still

utterly unlike anything they had previously known. Saint Mark tells us that the

disciples on their way down from the mountain of the Transfiguration were

puzzled by the saying of Jesus that the Son of Man would “rise from the dead”.

And they asked one another what “rising from the dead” could mean (9:9-10).

And indeed, what does it mean? The disciples did not know, and they could find

out only through encountering the reality itself. Anyone approaching the

Resurrection accounts in the belief that he knows what rising from the dead

means will inevitably misunderstand those accounts and will then dismiss them

as meaningless . . . Now it must be acknowledged that if in Jesus’ Resurrection we

were dealing simply with the miracle of a resuscitated corpse, it would ultimately

be of no concern to us. For it would be no more important than the resuscitation

of a clinically dead person through the art of doctors . . . The New Testament

testimonies leave us in no doubt that what happened in the “Resurrection of the

Son of Man” was utterly different. Jesus’ Resurrection was about breaking out

into an entirely new form of life, into a life that is no longer subject to the law of

dying and becoming, but lies beyond it – a life that opens up a new dimension of

human existence. Therefore the Resurrection of Jesus is not an isolated event that

we could set aside as something limited to the past, but it constitutes an

“evolutionary leap” (to draw an analogy, albeit one that is easily misunderstood).

In Jesus’ Resurrection a new possibility of human existence is attained that affects

everyone and that opens up a future, a new kind of future, for mankind.

The point is this: people are raised from the dead all

the time. We saw Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus and the

centurion’s son all raised from the dead. We hear stories

of people all the time whose heart stopped and brain died

that are walking aorund to tell their story today. But that

Jesus rose from the dead, an historical event, because He

was the Son of God, means that resurrection is not just the

random freak of nature. The Resurrection of the Son of God

means that all of us, by being baptized into the glorified

Body of Christ, share in a new life, a divine life. The

Resurrection is a supernatural event, and Jesus invites us

to share in it, and by doing so, to share His life.

But how do we share in the divine life of the Risen Lord?

I am the bread of life . . . For I have come down from heaven, not to do my

own will but the will of him who sent me.  And this is the will of him who sent me,

that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last

day.  For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and

believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last

day. . . . No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I

will raise him up on the last day.  I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the

manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from

heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.  I am the living bread ethat came

down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. . .

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of jthe Son of Man and

drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks

my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.

If you want to know that Jesus is risen from the dead,

if you want to live forever and experience that Resurrection

in your own life, it is not enough just to believe that

Jesus did rise from the dead. It is not enough that you

even have faith. You must be baptized of water and the

spirit in the laver of regeneration which makes you into the

Body of Christ. And then you must go to Mass, and receive

worthily the Bread of Life which is the Eucharist. There is

no other way that God has given us but that. So, come let

us worship and bow down before Christ, who gives us his

life-creating and immortal mysteries, who gives us eternal

life in Him.

13. he ascended into heaven

When we explain the Ascension to our kids, the narrative

usually goes like this: forty days after Easter, Jesus

physically floated up into heaven, either like a bird that

just kept going higher and higher until he was seen no more,

or like a NASA Space Shuttle going into the great beyond.

Jesus is no longer here, but He said He was coming back for

us, so the time between the Ascension and the Second Coming

is a time of Jesus’ absence, and we have the Church in His

place, which encourages us to have faith that He will come

back again and we will get see Him face to face just like

the Apostles did, but this time, He will not leave again.

Now, in the years of silliness in the decade that taste

forgot, the 1970s, there were Catholic parishes which

actually sang that little tune written by John Denver and

made popular by Peter, Paul and Mary, “leaving on a jet

plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again.” Thank God we

have evolved beyond that silliness, but the fact anyone had

it in his dubiously right mind to sing that at Mass points

to a serious problem in our understanding of the event of

the Ascension. No wonder then that some Christians have

tried to explain it away as a mythological gloss which is as

irrelevant to modern man as Peter, Paul and Mary. Rudolf

Bultmann, the famous liberal Protestant biblical scholar,

wrote, “No one who is old enough supposes that God lives in

a local heaven. If this is so, the story of Christ’s

ascension into heaven is done for.”

But if we go back to the Scriptures and to the Liturgy,

we find that there is much more here than meets the eye than

just a Jesus in space spoof written by pre-scientific

peoples that a few dupes still believe in the 21st century.

What happens to Jesus at the ascension is always described

in the Biblical text by passive verbs: he is lifted up, he

is taken up, he is exalted. The event is not a prodigy by

which Our LORD in His human nature jumps up really, really

high into the sky. It is an action of the Father, a mighty

act of God who brings Jesus unto Himself: it is not some

kind of cool airshow like a divine version of the Blue

Angels. From the point of view of Scripture, the

interesting thing is not the upward mobility of the

Resurrected Body of Jesus. It is the image of the cloud.

Let’s go back to the Old Testament. Remember when God

brings His Chosen People out of Egypt. As they wandered

through the wilderness, there was a pillar of cloud by day

and a pillar of fire by night to guide them to the Promised

Land. The pillar of cloud and fire is the presence of God,

but one which is hidden, a mystery, but one in which the

People of God are led by the Father. It is a manifestation

of His providential rule over all. With the Ascension, God

comes back to rule His people through the cloud into which

the LORD is caught up. The LORD and His reign are present

in the hidden-ness of the cloud. We are reminded of those

words we sing every Sunday at the Creed, where Jesus sits at

the right hand of the Father. The right hand of the Father

is not a place, but an image of power, glory and dominion.

Christ shares in the Father’s world-encompassing power from

the cloud, the image of the mysterious continuing way in

which Divinity guides Humanity.

So how is the cloud of the Ascension any different than

the cloud of the Jews in Exodus? In Exodus, humanity is

still far away from God because of sin. But with the

Incarnation, God becomes man. And so in Christ, human

nature has entered into the inner life of God. It means

that man has found an everlasting union with God. Heaven is

not a place beyond the stars, heaven is Jesus Himself.

Christ, the man who is in God and one with God, is also

God’s abiding openness to us all. heaven is not a place,

but a person, the divine person of Jesus Christ who shares

with us our humanity. We go to heaven and enter into heaven

to the extent that we enter into Christ.

My hunch is that the Apostles who stood there on Mount

of Olives watching this understood what was really going on

here. If heaven was a place beyond the stars and Jesus was

going there and they were left behind, as it were, they

would have been sad. Even the LORD’s promise to send them a

Comforter, who would come ten days later in the form of a

pillar of fire over every since one of the believers, would

not have lessened their sense of loss and sadness. But we

read in Luke 24.52: and they worshipped Him and returned to Jerusalem

with great joy. The Ascension was not a departure. It was not a

teary goodbye until some vaguely hinted at later. The

Ascension gave the disciples the certainty that the

Crucified One was not only alive, but that He had overcome

the world and death. He had overcome everything that cut

humanity off from God, and He opened the door to eternal

life, a door which would never be closed. Jesus’ Ascension

into heaven is not the beginning of a time of Absence. It

means that Jesus now definitively and irrevocably

participates in His Father’s royal power over the earth.

This is why the angel rebukes the apostles who remain

gazing up into the sky: Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into

heaven? (Acts 1.11) The apostles are to realize that the

LORD is ceaselessly present through their activity, inasmuch

as the gift of the Spirit and the commission to bear

witness, preach and spread the Good News are the way in

which Christ is now present to us. The preaching of the

Gospel is the way in which the LORD, between the Ascension

and the Second Coming, gives expression to his rule over the

world, as He reigns through His Word, as He is the Word

uttered forth from the Father before all worlds.

While we are in this world waiting for the Second

Coming, waiting to be forever with God in heaven, it is not

a time for sadness, but a time for joy. Because Christ from

the cloud of the ascension, sitting at the right hand of the

Father, reigns through His Word, His Church and His

Sacraments as surely as He was present to the Disciples in

Galilee of Judea. It is by our faith that we pierce the

cloud of mystery and are led to begin to take possession of

heaven and the Kingdom of God, not at some future date, but

now in Christ Jesus Our LORD.

14. and is seated at the right hand of God the Father

Almighty

I have always said that, if I were ever to build my own

church, there would be one thing I would never put in it:

pews. You may not know this, but pews were invented by

Protestants, who had to sit in church on Sunday morning and

listen to sermons even longer than mine. They eventually

crept into Catholic churches in countries where there was a

Protestant majority, but even today, if you go to the great

churches of Europe, you will be hard pressed to find pews.

The Catholic liturgy is actually a bit more free-flowing

than we have become used to, and the only chair that is

mandated by the ancient rubrics of the Church was the throne

of the Bishop. It may seem like a rather strange thing, but

it is actually rooted in Scripture and in the culture of the

ancient world.

In many ancient cultures, a seat was a symbol of

authority. Kings and bishops and important people were

seated. We read that when Jesus went into the synagogue, he

sat down. For us, that might not mean all that much. When

we go to a Bible study, we usually pick up a seat and sit

down too. But for Jesus to do so meant that He was claiming

to have authority. The Bishop, who in the liturgy, is to

supposed to be an image of Christ the High Priest, sits at a

cathedra, a Latin word for throne whence we get the term

cathedral. According to the rubrics of the Pontifical, the

little red directions printed in the book that tells the

Bishop how he should say Mass, says that when the Bishop

preaches, he imitates Jesus in the synagogue and is seated.

So when Martin Luther started the Protestant

Revolution, he taught that every believer had the authority

to interpret Scripture for himself, and lo and behold,

everyone got a seat soon after. Catholics only later

adopted the practice because pews made it more comfortable

than sitting, standing and kneeling on the floor, and most

Eastern Orthodox churches still today do not have pews. All

of this to indicate that when we say in the Creed that Jesus

is seated at the right hand of the Father, that indicates that Jesus

has authority and He has a right to sit there.

The right hand is another phrase that might not mean much

to us anymore, but that is really important. We may talk

about someone’s “right hand man” when talk about someone who

is useful or even indispensable. And I don’t think there is

anyone around anymore who thinks that there is anything

particularly sinister about left-handed people, although the

superstitious throughout the ages have invented all kinds of

weird tales about them. In the Scriptures, though, there is

a lot of meaning with all that. First of all, the right and

the left are two entirely different directions, and

symbolize what is good and what is evil. The Gospels use

the image of the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the

chaff, as well to get across this point. On the right hand

of God, there is all that is good and holy and lovely, which

means that there is another side, which is its opposite, all

that is evil, demonic and ugly. For Jesus to be seated at

the right hand means that He has an authority and a right to

reign with the Father over the Just, and that there is

nothing in Him which is evil, demonic and ugly.

So when we say these words in the Creed, we affirm that

Jesus is not just some kind of random guy who taught in His

own name and could have been weak and sinful like the rest

of us. We see Him as the Authority, and that there is

nothing in Him which separates Him from the Father. He is

also divine, and shares fully in the essence of God. We

recognize that Jesus is Lord over all the earth, that He has

dominion over all things.

And it also reminds us that Jesus is Lord only in

relation to God, who is described here in this phrase not

just with any kind of description, but as Father and as

Almighty. The Church’s Creed could have used all kinds of

words that refer to God that would have been true, like All-

Knowing or Merciful or All-Loving, but she chose Father

Almighty.

It is an odd juxtaposition, isn’t it? We have to be

careful when we talk about God as Father so that we don’t

project onto God whatever we think about our own dads. When

we do, then it can either make our relationship to God one

of fear, hatred or sentimentality. But when we see the

Fatherhood as what fatherhood is supposed to be, in its

perfection, a clear image emerges: father as protector and

provider, one who gives life and is an active part of our

life. It shows forth that God is not some kind of far away

mythical force in the sky. He is very near indeed and He

has a personal care and interest in us. At the same time,

though, we can’t oversentimentalize the fatherhood of God,

either. He is Father, not daddy, and He is certainly not

the kind of frazzled and harried dad that modern sitcoms

portray as Father.

Today, there are a lot of people, who project an image

onto the Father of their own dads, who they hated or they

were terrified of, who insist that, if there is a God at

all, He should be loved and not feared. They reason, “The

Bible reveals that God is Love, so how can we fear Him?”

Yet, Proverbs 9.10 and Psalms 111.10 says, The fear of the Lord is

the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. Now

of course, this not servile fear, as if we were scared

little children hiding from an arbitrary and cruel abuser,

but a sense of deep understanding that God is Almighty and

we are not, and that we are entirely dependent on Him for

everything we have. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 1831 lists

the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and the last one

mentioned is fear of the Lord.

Some well-meaning people have begun to call the fear of

the Lord something else, and I have even heard Bishops at

Confirmation say “we don’t call it that anymore.” Except

that both the Bible and the Catechism call it that, and it

is that, and any other translation falsifies that the fear

of the Lord is a gift. The Holy Spirit gives the believer

the knowledge that Jesus sits at the right hand of God, who

is the Almighty Father. Once again, it is not a gift to

cause us to be terrified that God is going to do something

cruel and horrible to us. It is a gift that saves us from

rank sentimentalism, from the idolatry of cutting God down

to our size and making Him in our image and likeness instead

of the other way around. It is the gift which gives us a

sense of wonder, awe and reverence.

As soon as you see someone come into church, you can

tell whether they have kept that gift of the Holy Spirit

that was given to them in Baptism and strengthened in

Confirmation. When you see someone come into church as if

it were a movie theater, plop down on a seat and surf the

net on their Iphone or balance their checkbook, when they

refuse to listen to the readings and sing the parts of the

Mass, if they come to Mass at all, when they sit there and

make judgments about what someone next to them is wearing,

or how they smell, or how boring the preacher is, when they

go up to Communion just because everyone else is getting up,

receive Holy Communion as if they were taking out the kitty

litter and run out of church in the Judas Shuffle like a

devil sprinkled with Holy Water, well, yes, it is obvious:

they have lost the gift of the fear of the Lord. Their

irreverence, their indifference to the sacred, their

impatience with the holy, all are signs of a spiritual

illness which threatens the life of their soul. Even if

their lips say that Jesus sits at the right hand of God the

Father Almighty, their hearts deny every single word.

That is why these words of the Creed are so important.

We must not only say them with our lips, but live them in

our hearts. We must let the words of the Creed form our

understanding so we learn more who God is, and let the words

of the Creed change our hearts so that we too may reign with

Christ at the right hand of the Father Almighty, when from

fear of the Lord we will pass into complete union with God.

15. from thence He will come to judge the quick and the dead

A couple of weeks ago I got a letter from a woman who had

stopped coming to church because she felt that every time

she came, she felt I judged her because she never did enough

for God, and all she wanted was a word of consolation and

comfort to get her through the week. Now, of course I am in

no kind of position to judge anybody, but as a priest I have

the duty to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted,

so I responded, “But how can we ever do enough for God, when

He is infinite in mercy and goodness? If you feel this way,

then maybe that is the voice of your conscience speaking and

you need to pray about that.”

It is hard when we feel judged by someone. It can

lower our self-esteem, it can hamper our relationships with

other people. We can become extremely sensitive to the

slightest criticism and see everything as an attack. The

irony of the whole thing, though, is often, when we do feel

judged, by others, rightly or wrongly, we go on the

defensive and then judge others as well. The most quoted

line of Scripture is Matthew 7.1: Judge not, lest ye be judged. How

many times have we hurled that line of the Bible at someone

because we do not like what they said about about us, or how

we felt because of something they did?

And when we feel horrible because of something someone

else did or said, it feeds the monster of our despair, and

can cause us to fall into sin. Whether what the person said

was actually right or not, we seek balm for our wounded

pride, and so often we turn to food, alcohol, sex or drugs

for the creature comfort we have lost. And then we can

easily spiral out of control, and before we realize it, we

have lost not only our pride and our sense of comfort, but

our job, our family, our faith, our very dignity.

This is all part of a tendency in man after the fall

that the theologians call concupiscence. We are made in the

image and likeness of God, and called to eternal friendship

with God, but, after the Fall of Adam and Eve, there is

something not quite right with us. St Paul put his finger

on it when he wrote in Romans 7.9, For I do not do the good I want,

but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Jesus, of course,

comes to free us from sin and heal our concupiscence. He

forbids us to judge others because He knows what kind of

havoc that wreaks on our weak souls.

Yet we also read in Luke 17.3: If your brother sins, rebuke him.

If he repents, forgive him. Galatians 6.1 shows us how we are to do

that: If a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should

restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted.

We are also told that we must not fear calling out sin for

what it is, even in others. 2 Timothy 4.2: Preach the Word, be

urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke and exhort, be unfailing in

patience and teaching.

So how do we put all of this together? An interesting

exclusive interview with Pope Francis was published this

week. Antonio Spadaro, the Jesuit interviewer, started out

with the question, “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” And you

know what he replied, “A sinner.” If the Vicar of Christ on

earth can simply identify himself like that, it should cause

us to reflect. He also said:

“We must always consider the person. Here we enter into

the mystery of the human being. In life, God

accompanies persons, and we must accompany them,

starting from their situation. It is necessary to

accompany them with mercy . . . The dogmatic and moral

teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The

church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the

transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to

be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary

style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary

things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more,

what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples

at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise

even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall

like a house of cards, losing the freshness and

fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel

must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this

proposition that the moral consequences then flow.”

What is the individual Christian and what is the whole

Church supposed to do with all of this? As Christians, we

must have the courage and the honest to face the fact that,

when we open the Word of God, we will receive words of

consolation and comfort. We will also at times have our

conscience moved and will feel that there is something

wrong. We must pray for the grace of humility to accept

that where we are right now, no matter where that is, is not

where we can be, and not where God wants us, which is at His

right hand forever. Whenever the ugly demon of pride

manifests its power in our soul, we have to rebuke it and

rip it out root and branch. We must pray for the grace of

true sorrow for our sins and for the Lord to purify us and

make us whole. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.

That’s not to give us a guilt complex and low self-esteem,

it is to realize that, while we have no right to judge,

Christ does. And when we our conscience convicts us of sin,

we have to run to His Mercy and have confidence in His power

to supply for our weakness. As a Church, all of us, who

know that we are sinners, have to proclaim the mercies of

God and that there is a better and more beautiful life

beyond our sin.

Then, and only then, can we, from a place of love and

not from a place of hypocrisy, admonish the sinner to turn

to God and live. We must pray for courage and perseverance

to preach the Word in season and out of season, not

cowtowing to human respect, and not keeping silence before

evil just because someone might get mad or ridicule us. We

do not have the right to judge people wrongly,

indiscriminately, from a place of sin. But we do have a

duty to root out sin from our lives, cling to Christ, and

bear each other’s burdens.

For if we listen to the voice of God in our rightly

formed conscience, if we turn away from sin and to Him, then

Jesus’ words, If you are my friends, you will do what I command you, will

come as a word of light and life. We will be judged, and

found worthy. One day we will stand before Him as Judge,

and nobody else, and He will ask us, What have you done with My

Love? What will your answer be?

16. I believe in the Holy Spirit

Throughout this series on the Creed, I have tried to get

across the fact that the structure of our faith is

Trinitarian: what we believe and even how we pray in the

liturgy is to the Father, through the Son and in the Holy

Spirit. Everything that God does involves all three, but

often we tend to focus on one Person or other of the

Trinity, and because of the Incarnation we tend to focus

alot on the Son, Jesus. The earliest Councils of the Church

were all about trying to figure out who Jesus is, and it is

the fruit of those meetings that we have all of those words

in the Nicene Creed about Jesus.

But soon enough, people started asking questions about

the Spirit. In 381, the bishops met at the First Council of

Constantinople because a group of people called the

Pneumatomachi, the Spirit Killers, were running around

saying that the Holy Spirit was not divine. The Fathers of

the Council declared that, in order to be a Christian, you

had to believe the Spirit was God, and to get across that

point, they added to the Creed of Nicea that the Spirit

proceeds from the Father. Then, some heretics started

running around saying that the Spirit proceeds from the

Father but not the Son, and so Pope Leo I in 447 declared

that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, but

nobody felt the need to add those words to the Creed until

Charlemagne around the year 800 stuck it there and ordered

that the Creed be said every Sunday at Mass in his kingdoms.

The funny thing is that, at Rome, they didn’t say the

Creed at Mass. When Pope Beneduct VIII was asked as late as

1014 why, he responded, “Well, we have never needed to be

reminded of the Creed, because we have never had any of you

crazy heretics in Rome!” But, just to make sure, he ordered

the Creed be said at Mass on Sundays. The entire Eastern

Church went wild, saying that the Pope was forcing the

Church to say something that was not in the Nicene Creed,

even though it has been in the Creed for centuries, and

their own theologians and doctors taught the doctrine.

After an unfortunate series of events, the Orthodox Churches

went into schism and the most of the East has been out of

communion with the Roman Church ever since.

I tell you all this history, not just to trace the

development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, but to

underline the point that the Church has struggled mightily

to understand who the Spirit is and what He is not. There

is a lot of drama associated with the Spirit in Church

history. From time to time in Church history, Christians

feel the need to focus on the Holy Spirit at the expense of

the Trinity. And then weird stuff begins to happen.

As early as the second century, a curious figure called

Montanus started runnign around saying that He was the

incarnation of the Holy Spirit. That wasn’t getting him

enough street cred, so then he started saying that he was

Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In the Middle Ages, some

Franciscans started saying they were the only really

spiritual ones, and prophesied the end of the world in their

time. Cathars and Albigensians assured everyone that the

Holy Spirit had revealed to them that marriage was a sin and

matter was evil, but that didn’t stop them from free love

and anarchist politics.

Closer to our own day: in 1906, some AME people rented

a shack on Azusa Street in LA for a prayer meeting and

started speaking in tongues, writhing on the floor, and

prophesizing. It was the beginning of the modern

Pentecostal Movement, which today is the fastest growing

sect of Christianity in the world. And lest you think that

none of this would touch the Catholic Church at all, at

Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, a retreat caught on

pentecostal fire in 1967 and sparked the Catholic

Charismatic Renewal, which is also one of the fastest

growing sectors of Catholicism, along with, ironically, the

movement to restore the Traditional Latin Mass.

The Church often lets these movements grow for a while,

and then sets out on the arduous process of discernment of

the Spirit: namely, is this actually the Holy Spirit working

in the life of the Church in a new and unexpected way, and

or is it a bunch of people who need their heads shocked?

The Church has made the determination that a lot of these

movements were just plain weird or heretical, and the Church

is still involved in a process of discernment about the

Charismatic Movement. Protestant Pentecostalism has taken

hundreds of thousands of people away from the Church,

especially in Latin America. And Charismatic Catholics have

gone through a process from some really weird practices to

being much more grounded in Scripture and Tradition now than

they were in 1967. There are even people now I like to call

trentocostals, who are Charismatics who go to the Latin

Mass! It’s a big Church, folks, and there is room for

everybody!

All of this going on today I think is a sign that there

is a great hunger for solid spiritual food. People are

tired of a Christianity which does not do anything for their

lives. They want to feel the Spirit working in their lives,

they want to know they are connected to God. Now, of

course, the Catholic Tradition has a somewhat nuanced

approach to this desire. The history of the Church is full

of examples of saints who have exhibited some extraordinary

manifestations of Holy Ghost power: fearless preaching,

raising people from the dead, healings and miracles,

levitation, bilocation, you name it. And at the same time,

the Church’s tried and true classical spiritual tradition is

very severe about these things: if God gives you these

gifts, then that’s great. The Church will subject you to

extreme tests of humility to make sure you don’t become

prideful and lead others into error, and to make sure you’re

not just making it all up or are possessed by a demon. And

the Church reminds us that when we are baptized, we get the

gifts of the Spirit. At Confirmation, those gifts are

strengthened in us to prepare us for our mission to

evangelize in the world. The only thing that keeps us from

a real life in the Spirit is not that we don’t speak in

tongues or shout “Amen” at random intervals during the

homily, but that we sin and, when we do that, we block the

gifts of the Spirit from being fruitful in us.

But we live in an age which is irrational, overly

emotional, and sentimental. And sentimentality is the enemy

of true religion, because we can make our faith about what

we feel, and our heart is not always a good guide in the

things of the Spirit. We must purify our hearts and

strengthen our intellects, in communion with the Church, if

we are really to understand Truth and how it applies to our

lives. Ronald Knox, who wrote The Creed in Slow Motion that

inspired this sermon series, also wrote a book called

Enthusiasm where he looks at the various movements throughout

Christian history that forgot these essential truths.

The desire to feel true religion has ended up people

with running around saying that God told them to do all

kinds of crazy things, leaving the Church established by

God, and leading others into error. Saint Ignatius of

Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, knew about this dynamic

and propsed a series of rules for spiritual discernment. I

wish more people knew about them, but because they are

grounded in the sound spiritual tradition of the Church.

They are too long to go into today at Mass, but they are

posted in a blog post on the website, along with some very

good audio files of some conferences about them.

The Holy Spirit is God, and we have to have a

relationship with Him, as with all of the other persons of

the Trinity. But the Spirit is already in us because of our

Baptism. Sometimes He will distribute extraordinary graces

to people as He wills, but we should not try to channel them

into us, either. A true devotion to the Spirit consists in

learning to discern God’s will in our lives. The classical

spiritual tradition of the Church gives us those tools, such

as the rules for discernment of spirits according to St

Ignatius. We may not “feel the Spirit” working in our

lives, but we will see the effects that come about in our

lives when we let the Spirit guide us, instead of letting

our emotions do so. If you want your faith to come alive,

stop trying to channel the Spirit like a medium or a wizard,

get on your knees and find the Spirit within that was given

to you at Baptism!

17. the Holy Catholic Church

I am sure you have seen people around Greenville wearing T-

shirts that say, “I love my church.” The people who wear

them belong to an ecclesial community called Newspring, and,

from many points of view, they are admirable people. They

are Christians who believe in the Lord Jesus and want to

bring other people to Him, and they are not ashamed of Him

at all. But I have always wondered why their T-shirts say,

“I love my church” and not “I love THE Church” or “I love

Christ’s Church.” I mean, is there any difference between

their T-shirts that say, “I love my church” and what we say

in the Creed, “I believe in one, holy, catholic and

apostolic Church”?

Well, yes there is, and a very important one.

Newspring was founded by a man named Perry Noble several

years ago in Anderson, and they have these satellites all

over South Carolina where you can watch Pastor Noble beamed

in on satellite for their services. Our church was founded

by Jesus Christ upon the apostles and their successors. But

what is the real difference? I mean, you will hear a lot of

the same things at Newpsring that you will hear at Prince of

Peace, so does it really matter if I go to one or the other?

Shouldn’t I just try to find a church where I can say, “I

love my church?”

In the earliest centuries of Christianity, there was a

sense that, in order to be able to distinguish what group of

people who called themselves Christians was really in the

line of those who were founded by Christ, and not by some

man, two things were necessary: the Eucharist and the

Bishop. The Church was a communion: it meant that you were

in union with a Bishop who could trace his lineage back to

the Apostles themselves and who was in union with all the

other Bishops who could do the same. It meant that you went

to Communion, too: that you were one with the community that

celebrated the Eucharist in union with those Bishops. Every

Christian believed in one Lord, one faith, and one Baptism.

But only the Christians who were in communion with the

ancient Church could really claim to be founded by Christ.

St Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage, said quite bluntly,

“He who does not have the Church as his Mother cannot have

God as His Father.” The Church wasn’t this kind of vague

thing that you belonged to because you believed in Jesus.

The Church was a visible community of people around one

Altar, one Bishop, and all in communion with Him. The Bishop

of Rome, the Pope, had a special role among the Bishops to

preserve that unity. To not be in union with the Bishop of

Rome meant that you did not belong to the Church at all.

But from time to time, bishops, priests and laypeople

would start to preach or teach certain novelties. Soon,

they would stop celebrating the Eucharist communion with the

Bishop of Rome, their local Bishop, and their local church,

and set up their own Altar, their own Eucharist, their own

Church. The word heresy comes from a Greek word meaning to

separate, and the heretics would go off on their own to

celebrate Mass, because they did not want to submit to the

authority of the Ancient Church, which kept the faith by

those bonds of communion, handing down the Tradition and the

Scriptures unchanged from one generation to the next.

Some of these groups became very popular for a while,

and then gradually disappeared, others came and went without

much notice. All the while, the Catholic Church kept on

going. The departure of these groups helped her to grow in

her understanding of the ancient faith and clarify its

expression. But in the sixteenth century, something

happened which would make things a bit complicated. Led by

people who have since come to be known as the Reformers,

people like Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, Christians started

to separate themselves from the communion of the Church, not

so they could say Mass somewhere else, but but so they could

not celebrate the Mass at all. The Church Fathers used to

teach that the Church makes the Eucharist and the Eucharist

makes the Church. But the Reformers rejected the Catholic

understanding of the Mass entirely, so much so that Luther

called the Mass an abomination. The Mass was no longer the

Sacrifice of Calvary, and Holy Orders was longer a

Sacrament. So the bonds between Altar, the priesthood and

the Church were denied. The Protestant Revolution declared

that every individual could decide what Scripture meant for

himself, and that the Church was not a visible institution

of visible bonds of communion like going to Mass in union

with the Bishops who could trace their lineage back to the

Apostles, but merely whomever believed in Jesus (unless they

were Catholics, of course).

Needless to say, the Catholic Church during the Council

of Trent reacted vigorously, and declared that only the

Catholic Church was the true Church, and that to be a part

of the true Church meant that you had to be in visible

communion with her. Now, of course, this was necessary to

protect the understanding of the Church that she had

received from her Savior. But it also meant that

Protestants and Catholics didn’t really have much to say to

each other for 400 years.

In the 19th century, though, both Protestants and

Catholics wanted to get beyond the visible vs. invisible

Church debate that had just ended any discussion between

them. Theologians began to reflect on the Church as the

Body of Christ, and what that meant. Anglicans came up with

their Branch Theory, that the Church had several branches:

Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. Catholics rejected

that, because then it would mean that Christians would have

to hold completely contradictory viewpoints as equally true,

which would make the whole thing senseless. But as

theologians reflected on Paul’s image of the Church as the

Mystical Body of Christ, Christians began to reflect on what

they had in common rather than what separated them. The

ecumenical movement was born, as a way of dialogue, prayer,

and cooperation towards greater unity.

At Vatican II, the Catholic Bishops reflected on the

fact that we become Christians and are incorporated into the

Body of Christ, the Church, by the Sacrament of Baptism.

There is one Lord, one Faith and one Baptism. And so there

is only one Church. The Catholic Church alone possessed the

fullness of truth, as Lumen gentium states, “The true Church

of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church.” But that also

meant that there were elements of truth, of Christianity, of

the Church present, to a greater or lesser degree, in other

communities of Christians, and indeed, even in other

religions. Alongside the true teaching that the Church

makes the Eucharist and the Eucharist makes the Church, that

the Church is a visible institution made up of visible bonds

of communion, the Church also recognized that she is first

and foremost, not an institution, but, she also has a

sacramental nature.

Vatican II talks about the Church as a sacrament: as a

visible sign willed by Christ that gives grace. That

doesn’t mean that the Catholic Church no longer believes she

is the true Church. (I mean, after all, if you don’t think

she is the true Church, why would you bother?) But it does

mean that she recognizes that there are levels of communion,

people are in communion with the Church in varying degrees,

and to the extent that they are in communion, that should be

affirmed and celebrated. But that doesn’t mean we can just

sit back and say, “Well, as long as they’re Christian, as

long as they go to some church, or as long as they believe

in God, it doesn’t matter.” In fact, it ups the ante for

the Church’s mission to evangelize and bring people into

union with the Catholic Church. We want to bring everyone,

not just into some, imperfect, incomplete union with Christ

and His Church, but into perfect, complete, full communcion

with Christ and His Church.

That’s why it is important that we not fall into the

trap of saying, “I love my Church.” Because, well, you

didn’t found the Church, it doesn’t belong to you, and you

can’t make and unmake it however you want. If anything, the

Catholic say, “I love THE Church”, “I love Christ’s Church,”

and because of that, we want to love everyone into full

communion with the Catholic Church, so that everyone may

profess the same faith handed down to us from the Apostles

and gather around one Altar at the one Sacrifice of the Mass

to celebrate the Body of Christ, both in the Eucharist and

in the Church.

18. the communion of Saints

One of the most powerful things I do as a priest is when I

give the Last Rites to a soul who is spending his last

moments on this side of the Great Beyond and then celebrate

his funeral. I spend an inordinate amount of time around

death and dying, so you’d think I would be either depressed

all the time or develop a “professional distance” and let it

affect me. We read in 1 Thessalonians 4.13, We do not want you

to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve

as others who have no hope. The more that I spend around death

and dying, the more I know that there is hope. As a

Christian, I believe, and I know by faith, than when we are

baptized into Christ, plunged into the ocean of His Mercy,

we put on Christ, we put on His Passion, Death and

Resurrection. And when we persevere to the end with that

baptismal robe of grace unstained, or whitened anew by

Penance, we know that we will reign with Christ in glory.

From time to time, somebody will ask me the question,

“Why do Catholics pray to the saints? Why can’t they just

go to God directly?” Of course, we all know the answer to

that question. Our prayer is directed to God through the

intercession of the saints, but that just takes too long to

say, and after all, the word to pray in English originally

comes from an Anglo-French word prier, which just means to

ask. It seems odd to me that Christians would say up and

down that so and so was in heaven, and they knew it because

they were saved by the blood of the Lamb, and then turn

around and think that the blessed in heaven just sit up

there with Jesus totally disinterested in what we are doing

down here on earth. I mean, we are used to invoking the

intercession of saints that the Church celebrates on her

calendar. I invoke St Anthony all the time because I would

lose my head if it weren’t attached to my body, and am

always saying, “Tony, Tony, come around, something’s lost

and got to be found!” If St Anthony is in heaven, and the

infallible act of canonization assures us that he is, then

he wants what God wants, and if God wants me to find my keys

for the millionth time, then by God, St Anthony of Padua

does, too!

Closer to home, we say that we know that our dear pious

grandma is in heaven because, well, she was a saint! So why

would she be up there in heaven with Jesus and not care one

bit if I discovered that I lost my keys, or that I had the

cancer, or that my children had lost their faith? The

blessed in heaven want what God wants, they reign with

Christ, and they are going to always ask their Father and

Lord for what is good for us. And even the souls in

purgatory! They know that they are saved, they just have to

await their final purification. Now, this a theological

opinion, so you can take it or leave it, but there was a

minority opinion among medieval theologians that the souls

in purgatory, who couldn’t do anything for themselves, could

still pray for us. The Church has never settled the

question, so even if my grandma is in purgatory, I ask for

her prayers, too. And even if she is burning in the fires

of hell for all eternity, God is going to take my request

for prayer and hear it anyways!

What a consolation to know that there is more to life

than just all of these visible human beings walking around.

Hebrews 12.1 encourages us, Therefore, since we are surrounded by so

great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings

so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. What an

amazing thing to think that our entire life is a race to

heaven, and that we have a cloud of witnesses who have all

done this same race and been victors, who are cheering us

on, because they know that, with God’s help, we can do it,

we can also win the crown of righteousness and be with them

and our God in heaven. No wonder then, that the Church not

only celebrates day after day the memorials of certain

saints held aloft for our veneration, but November 1’s Feast

of All Saints. We are in a profound communion with all of

the blessed in heaven, who want what God wants, and if God

wants us to be happy with Him in this life and the next,

they are our best of friends on the journey towards Him.

Now, of course, we talk in the Creed about the

communion of saints, and it is so easy to think that we are

just talking about people have St. before their names, or

should. That’s why we have to go back to our glorious

Catholic language, Latin, to the words communio sanctorum. We

are in union, not only with holy people, but holy places,

holy things, holy events: all that is holy is ours, our

birthright as adopted sons and daughters of God. Psalms

19.1 tells us, The heavens are telling the glory of God. And they do

indeed! The cloud of witnesses gathered around the Throne

of the Lamb singing, Holy, Holy, Holy Lord in the heavenly

liturgy attests to that. But our God does not want us to

have to wait to get there for us to be able to taste some of

that glory. Heaven and earth are full of your glory, Hosanna in the

highest! we sing in the Sacred Liturgy where heaven and earth

meet in a little space, right here and right now.

One of the greatest glories of our Catholic faith is

that is truly incarnational. Just as the Word was made

flesh and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth,

He abides with us now under the sacramental veils of bread

and wine. He pitches His tent among us, and because He

does, He teaches us that all of creation can be sanctified,

made holy: The world is charged with the grandeur of God . . . it gathers to

greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed . . . And for all this, nature is never spent,

there lives the dearest freshness deep down things . . . because the Holy Ghost

over the bent world broods with warm breast and ah, bright wings!

Communio sanctorum: holy people, places, and things, the

veil of heaven is pulled back and sends its refreshing

dewfall upon creation. 1 Peter 1.15: As He who called you is holy,

be holy in all you do. The Church makes holy, likens unto God, so

many things: you, when you make the Sign of the Life-Giving

Cross on your forehead, lips and chest and listen to the

Good News; her priests and religious, when they vow

themselves to God and His Majesty; her churches, shrines,

sanctuaries, basilicas, and cathedrals; her sacramentals,

rosaries, medals, scapulars; she blesses everything under

the sun: water, wine, bread, oil, houses, electric dynamos,

incense, schoolrooms… Everything that is, that is created

by God, can be set apart, and made holy. As Catholics, we

are surrounded by holiness, not just in heaven but here on

earth. And where we have lost that sense of a world where

God is present in so many ways, we must restore the sacred,

and renew our wonder that God would choose the weak things

of this world as earthen vessels for a divine message of

Love.

Today, as we recite the Creed, as we have Sunday after

Sunday for so many centuries at Mass, let us pray for the

grace, not only to run the race to heaven like our

forebearers the saints, but to cooperate with God’s work to

sanctify this world, too. Then the communion of saints will

be something to look forward to in hope, but also something

that we are a part of right here and right now.

19. the forgiveness of sins

It is one of the questions we get from non-Catholics all the

time. “Why do you have to confess your sins to a priest?

Why can’t you just go directly to God?” Usually, we hear

this question from people who say they believe everything

the Bible says, but then who turn around and say that the

Sacrament of Confession is nowhere to be found in the Bible.

Yet, James 5.16 commands us, Confess your sins to each other and pray

for each other so you might be healed. The Apostle James seems to

think that Christians, at least among themselves, should be

in a safe place where they can admit to each other their

wrongdoings and pray for each other, that they could be

healed from the wounds that sin causes to our souls.

In the early Church, there was such a thing as a public

confession. People who had committed serious sins would

come to church and in the context of the Mass would confess

before God and everybody what they had done. The Bishop

would them impose upon them a public penance, which could

mean even standing outside the church door on Sundays for a

year. On Holy Thursday, there was a special Mass that was

celebrated in the morning called the Mass for the

Reconciliation of the Penitents, where the Bishop would

welcome public sinners back into the church and welcome them

back to the Eucharistic table, from which they were excluded

because they had committed such grave sins.

Of course, the Church grows and develops throughout

history, and, as the Church began to reflect more on sin,

and the various levels of sin and the consequences sin

produces in the soul, people became more sophisticated in

their examination of conscience. They wanted to go to a

spiritual father and talk through these things, even those

sins which were less grave, which we call venial sins. And

so gradually, the practice of what is called auricular

confession developed. Christians would go privately to

their priests and confess their sins and receive spiritual

guidance. Gradually, all that was left of public confession

during Mass was the Confiteor, the prayer where we say, I

confess to you, almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have

gravely sinned . . . through my most grevious fault. The Holy Thursday

Mass of the Reconciliation of Penitents disappeared, and

people started to go to Confession more and more often.

The Apostle James seems to indicate that Christians

should confess their sins to one another and pray for each

other’s healing. That has always been a part of our faith.

Pope Francis recently referred to the Church using one of

the images I love most for her, a battlefield hospital for

sinners. Paul writes the Galatians (6.1-2), If a man is

overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of

gentleness. Look to yuorself, lest you be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens,

and so fulfill the law of Christ. We fulfill the law of love, we become

who the Church really is, a Mother of Mercy, when the Church

becomes a safe space for us to confess our sins, receive

true spiritual help and help each other bear those burdens

which life throws our way. And when we do not do that as a

Church, we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing,

and we all suffer for it.

But why do we go to confession to a priest? Why can’t

we just admit we have sinned in the Penitential Rite of the

Mass and just get on with things? Why do we go into a

little room set apart, tell a priest how long it has been

since our last confession, and list the number of times we

have committed certain specific actions which have

interrupted our communion with God?

Well, the first reason is that when we sin, we do not

just commit an offense against God, but we wound the entire

Body of Christ. We are all in this together because of our

Baptism, and so when we commit a sin, even if it is a

private one that nobody else knows about, it harms the

entire Body of Christ, the Church. And so the entire

Church, symbolized in the person of the priest, is involved

in reconciling us back to God. We also have a need to admit

what we have done and know that we can talk about it in a

place where we can have privacy and secrecy, because

otherwise we might be tempted to keep it all inside and then

we would let sin eat away at us. Also, going through the

rite of Confession is important so we can have the assurance

that we are forgiven. We have to hear those words, “I

absolve you from your sins, I forigve you, I pardon you” if

we are going to believe them. And it is not, properly

speaking, the priest who absolves from sin. Chris Smith

can’t do anything for you. All I do is lend my voice and

lips and mouth to the words of our Loving and Merciful God

who says to the repentant sinner, I absolve you, I free you, I love you.

Remember that the very first Easter Night, right after

Jesus had risen from the dead, the first thing that He

thought of doing was assuring the world that sin could be

forgiven because of what he did: dying on the infamous

gibbet of the Cross as a ransom for our sins and rising from

the dead so that we could live in eternal friendship with

Him forever. In John 20.19-23, we read, Jesus came and stood

among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When He had said this, He

showed them His hands and His side. Then, the disciples were glad that they saw

the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent

me, so I send you.” And when He had said this, he breathed on them, and said to

them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if

you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Jesus’ first concern after the Resurrection was to give

peace to the world. Since only God could forgive sin and

grant peace, Jesus is careful to mention that he and the

Father is one. Jesus is God, and as God, He forgives sin.

And this, His power to forgive sins, He communicates to the

disciples gathered in the Upper Room. He shows to the first

priests the marks of His Passion that reconciled the world

to His Father for the remission of sins, and then sends them

out just as the Father sent Him. Jesus communicates to

those men who participate in His priestly office His power

to forgive sins, and sends them on mission to do so, to sow

peace in the world by not only hearing people’s sins, but

freeing them from those sins and the eternal punishment due

to them. He does something interesting. He breathes on

them. In Genesis 2.7 we read, the Lord God formed man of dust from

the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a

living being. The Father gives life to man by breathing life

into him at creation. But sin kills the soul; as Paul

starkly reminds us in Romans 6.23, the wages of sin is death. So

Christ comes to breathe life into the soul once dead in sin,

and breathes onto His priests that may may go out into the

world on a mission of mercy to do the same. If you forgive the

sins of any, they are forgiven: if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

Jesus is always giving His power to the Apostles, and

their successors, the priests of the Catholic Church he

founded. At the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, He

orders that the disciples distribute the miraculously

multiplied bread and fish. He orders the disciples to

forgive sins in His name. He is already in the Gospel

preparing the people for the ministry of the Church in

celebrating the sacraments by which Christ would nourish His

people until He comes again in glory.

So when people ask you, “Why can’t I just confess my

sins directly to God?” you can tell them, “You can do that,

but why do that when God established the Sacrament of

Confession in the Bible so you could receive His pardon and

peace!” We don’t go directly to God because Jesus

instituted the Sacrament of Penance so the entire Mystical

Body, the Church, could be involved in our reconciliation.

That is why one of the most important things a priest

can do is hear confessions. His is a mission of mercy so

important that he should only refuse a request for

Confession for the gravest of reasons or when the timing or

place of the request is unreasonable. But that is always

why one of the most important things you can do is go to

Confession. I know that there are many of you who go to

Confession regularly, and benefit tremendously from it. But

I also know that there are many of you who are in church

right now who haven’t been to confession in years. Maybe

there is still some pattern of sin in your life you are not

ready to renounce. Pray for the grace to change, pray for

the Lord to touch your heart and give you the grace of true

sorrow for your sins. There may be some of you whose

conscience is so weak or dead that you think you haven’t

sinned at all. To you, I quote 1 John 1. 8-10: If we say we

have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our

sins, He is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all

unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His

word is not in us. There may be some of you who refuse to go to

confession and still go to Communion. To you, I quote 1

Corinthians 11.27-31, Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the

cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and

blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink

of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats

and drinks judgement upon himself. That is why so many of you are weak and

ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we should not be

judged.

We have nothing to lose when we confess our sins and

receive the mercies of the Lord. On the contrary, we have

everything to gain. Sunday in and Sunday out, we say that

we believe in the forgiveness of sins. If that is true,

then our life needs to be coherent with that belief. If you

have been away from this beautiful sacrament of pardon and

peace, the time is now to come back home to the forgiving

arms of Jesus. Come back home to confession. And do it

soon, while you still have time.

20. the resurrection of the body

Every so often a heresy comes back with a vengeance which

has never been totally eradicated. It’s called dualism. I

think most people are aware that man has a material part,

the body, as well as an immaterial part, the soul. The

problem is how we understand the relationship between the

two. For most of the Jews of today and Jesus’ day, except

for some of the Sadduccees, man was body and soul, but the

only way you were going to live on after your death was in

the memory of those who loved you. The dualist, whether he

professes to be a Christian or not, looks at the body and

soul of man and sees them as fundamentally two very separate

and different things.

Some Greek philosophers held the notion that the soul,

because it was immaterial, could also be immortal, it could

not die. This concept was readily adopted by the Church as

she struggled to understand how we could share in the

Resurrection of Jesus. St Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic

Doctor, was able to explain that man is not just material

body + immortal soul, as if they were two things that just

existed alongside each other, but that man is an embodied

soul. The dualists were always always trying to pry the two

apart; St Thomas showed their fundamental unity.

If you are dualist, of course, it doesn’t really matter

what you do with your body. The Manicheans taught that all

matter was evil, and as a result they thought that marriage

was evil, too, but that it didn’t really matter what you did

with your body, so they didn’t have a highly developed

concept of sexual morality. Today, modern dualists have

dropped the “matter is evil” bit but kept the idea that

whatever you do with your body is fine, it is the spirit

that counts. It’s like those people who say, “Well, the

important thing is what’s in your heart” and so then they

refuse to actually admit that there are some actions which

we do with our bodies which are, of themselves evil, like

murdering others or adultery or what not.

The Church’s response to dualism in all of its forms

has been to celebrate the fact that we are embodied souls.

What we do with our souls matters, and what we do with our

bodies matters. The body is a temple of the Holy Spirit,

and our bodies, just like all of material creation, can be

sanctified, made holy, by the action of the Spirit. The

Church reminds us you are not just a body and a spirit, but

am embodied soul, which is why, at the end of time our souls

will be reunited with our bodies. If we are going to live

on eternally, it can’t be just part of us that lives on

eternally, but the whole man.

It’s not fashionable today to talk about hell. At best

it’s kind of explained away vaguely as the state of the

absence of God. While the Church’s teaching is not based on

the lurid imagery of Dante, which has so formed Western

Civilization’s idea of hell, she does teach that the damned

suffer in hell body and soul. How can they not, when we are

both? Likewise, we can often reduce purgatory to merely a

state of spiritual purification, like going to high-end spa

and having a scrubbing treatment that is mildly irritating

and exhilarating all at the same time. Yet there are

sensislbe pains in purgatory, as well. The spiritual pain

that we experience in purgatory at the full realization of

how our sins have offended God wil habe its complement in

the body, as well, because we can’t just separate the two

out like that.

Of course, the point of the Christian religion is for

us to not to go to hell and hopefully bypass even purgatory,

and I think we are more likely to want to be good Christians

less by having the hell scared into us than being inspired

by the vision of the blessed in heaven. So often we tend to

think of heaven as this kind of dreamy place in the skies,

kind of like a Snuggle commercial with stuffed animals

floating on clouds like they’ve been on their happy pills,

only the stuffed animals are the people we like. We even

talk about heaven as a place of eternal rest, which is open

to the misunderstanding that it is the most boring place

imaginable, like taking a really really long nap.

But it is in heaven where man becomes most fully

himself. He possesses the beatific vision, he is in eternal

friendship with God. He rests in the knowledge that he has

the fullness of life, but that’s about where the rest part

ends. Man is fully alive only in heaven, and not just as a

disembodied soul. It is the full man who will dwell in

heaven: everything you are, body and soul, will be present

to God in its most perfect form, you will literally be the

best you can be.

It is all of this we profess when we say that we

believe in the resurrection of the body in the Creed. It’s

also about as far removed from dualism as you can get. The

children of this world act as if the man who dies with the

most toys wins. At best, people will say, May his memory be

eternal, knowing full well that within a generation or two no

one will probably know or care that you ever existed at all.

This short-sighted, and inaccurate, view of what it means to

be you, can cause us to have serious tunnel vision. Our

perspective is severely limited to what is right before our

eyes. We can begin to live for the body at the expense of

the soul, because it is more immediate to us. It is the

loss of the reality of the future resurrection of the body

and its reunion with the soul that has led to so many of the

ills that plague our culture: the “Me” generations, instant

gratification, the worship of the body, exercise as a

religion, foodies who make gastronomy into a ritual

experience, total sexual lack of self-control. It all has

its roots in that dualism that refuses to believe that when

the coffin lid is closed over our corpses and we are put six

feet under, that moment is only the closing of a chapter in

a story where the next chapter is our judgment at the feet

of Christ and the last chapter is the reunion of our bodies

with our souls for all eternity.

Of course, the skeptic will say, “I will keep my tunnel

vision, thank you very much, and deal with what I can see.”

This dogma of the Christian faith seems to be the one which,

while it produces the greatest hope and highlights the

dignity of man, also seems the most hard to grasp and one

which seems more like a logical conclusion from first

principles than anything else. It can often seem more like

a philosophical construct than a living reality. That is

why the Catholic Church teaches that, at the end of her

earthly life, the Blessed Virgin Mary was assumed ito

heaven, body and soul. It was one thing for Jesus, who was

God, to rise from the dead and ascend into heaven. It was

another thing entirely for a mere mortal woman to be assumed

into heaven body and soul. The historical memory of that

event, which was not recorded in the Scriptures but has been

present in the Tradition since the earliest times, is so

strong that the Assumption of Mary is the emblem and

foretaste of our future resurrection as well.

The Assumption was something that was believed and

celebrated liturgically from the beginning. It was only in

1950 that Pope Pius XII declared it as a dogma of the

Church. And it he only did it then, not because Catholics

had someone ceased to believe in it, but because the world

was seized by another outbreak of dualism. The most

prevalent sin of our time is that we have forgotten the

resurrection of the body, and that has led to evils as

various as the mass extermination of peoples and atheism.

Pius XII wanted to remind us all, that where Jesus went, we

shall follow, not because we are God, but because God loves

us. So when you are tempted to look down from the heavens

where Mary reigns as Queen at the side of Christ the King,

look back up to see someone not so different than you, who

enjoys life eternal and wants you to do so, too!

21. and life everlasting.

I think everybody knows that the Catholic Church is pro-

life, but I wonder how many people really understand why.

The children of this world want to say that we are against

abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, contraception,

homosexuality, divorce and remarriage and in-vitro

fertilization, and then launch that list out against us as

proof that we are all stuck in some medieval dream world.

Blessed John Paul II sounded the warning alarm against what

he so presciently described as the culture of death. He

certainly knew what he was talking about, being forced by

the totalitarian revolution of the Nazis to slave away in a

workcamp not far from where they were burning millions of

Jews just because they were children of Abraham, then to

suffer under Communism until hope finally prevailed and the

walls of that false religion tumbled down all over Europe.

Benedict XVI showed us why these things were wrong as he

explained to everyone the philosophical and religious roots

of the dictatorship of relativism, as he came from a Europe

that seemed exhausted by its own tradition and so bored with

itself that all it could do was fritter away its heritage in

moral nihilism.

Now we have Pope Francis and the children of this

world, always eager for novelty, are convinced that he is

going to “get with the program” and usher the Catholic

Church into the brave new world where people are obsessed

with everything and anything that leads them to death and

destruction, all in the name of freedom. But what Pope

Francis has understood so well, is that even though his

predecessors were entirely accurate in describing what is

wrong with our world, people are deaf, dumb and blind and

can’t see what is right in front of their faces. He has

reminded us, in a loving and compassionate way, that we have

to put all of the moral teachings of the Church in their

proper context. Often because they have been presented

outside their proper context, just as one legalistic “No”

after another, they have been rejected by the world. A

world which knows very well what we as Catholics are

against, but not so much what we are for.

It’s easy to say that we are for life and love. But

why? Francis has suggested that we have to go back to

Christ, and see everything and everyone in His light. That

doesn’t change the teaching of the Church, it doesn’t mean

that John Paul II or Benedict are wrong, but it does mean

that, if we can bring people to Christ, how can they not,

when they allow themselves to be touched by grace, be drawn

into the mystery of life.

In Jeremiah 1.5 we hear those powerful words of the God

of Israel: Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you

were born I consecrated you. Now, of course, the literalist

biblical scholar would see this as applying merely to the

prophet Jeremiah. But those words have enchanted the Church

since the very beginning. It’s easy to say slogans such as

“life is a gift” and “life is sacred.” It’s another thing

to realize that every human being who has ever and ever will

exist on this earth is willed by God. So often you hear of

a man and woman talk like “We are going to plan our

children, we are going to say when we are going to have a

family or not.” The Bible, though, gives us a very

different perspective. God forms the human being in the

womb. Every new life is an act of creation. The seven days

of creation described in the Book of Genesis are re-created

anew. All we do is cooperate with God’s plan. Or get in

its way, and more often than not, we frustrate His divine

plan because we have too little faith and too weak hope that

He is going to use us to do His will.

The word “to know” in the Bible is a strong word, and

has many levels of meaning. Often we minimize it as if all

it meant was to recognize someone, “oh yeah, I know that

guy!” when it really indicates that God plans and knows us

down to our innermost core. There is nothing in us which He

does not want. That’s why it is so sad to hear of “unwanted

children.” Ancient peoples often left children out of doors

to the elements and exposed them to whatever came. Now, we

just speed up the process through forceps and a vaccuum

cleaner rather than vultures. But all of those children, all

of us, are wanted by God. And not only that, He say, we are

consecrated to Him: set apart, made different than all

material creation.

The early Church Fathers spoke of man as being made in

the image and likeness of God. As Christians, we do not

take on acts of charity because of altruism or philanthropy.

We become living flames of love because very man, woman and

child is made in the image and likeness of God. That is why

there is a particular care and reverence for the human

person. That is why the Church is a powerful voice for

human rights, and she has to put her money where her mouth

is to do all she can to ensure respect for the legitimate

rights and needs of all people. It is when we lose sight of

the fact that we are made in the image and likeness of God

that we fall back into the chaotic formless void that is

sin. When we forget that our neighbor is also made in the

image and likeness of God, that’s when we don’t think twice

about ruining his reputation by gossip, bullying her into

conforming to our standards, torturing him for not espousing

the right set of political belief, and killing those who we

think just shouldn’t be around anymore because their

presence annoys us.

But there is still more. God didn’t have to create us.

He didn’t have to create anything, actually. But the fact

that He did means that He wants us, and if He wants us, we

have no right to go against His will. Yet He could have

just left us on this earth, on the merely natural level of

giftedness. Instead, He wanted more of us, more from us,

and so He offers us, through His Son Jesus Christ, the

chance to share in, to participate in, His divinity, in His

very nature. Have you ever noticed at Mass, the priest puts

in a drop of water into the chalice mixed with wine and

mumbles a few words? He prays silently, By the mystery of this

water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled

Himself to share in our humanity. Again, Sacred Scripture: His divine

power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the

knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence, by which He

has granted to us His precious and very great promises, that through these you

may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and

become partakers of the divine nature. (2 Peter 1.3-4).

Everything that we say every Sunday we believe in the

Creed leads up to this. Remember when we started with the

word “I”? I am the one that God knew in the womb. I am the

one He has wanted to come into being from all eternity. I

am the image and likeness of God. And what do I do? I

believe. I believe in something, but not just anything. I

believe all of those truths that God has revealed about

Himself about His inner life and nature. I believe in all

of salvation history, in all of those historical events in

which God broke into human history and worked out His plan

of salvation. I believe all these things, because He wants

me to partake of His divine nature. Satan tempted Eve in

the Garden of Eden, and told her that she and Adam would be

like gods if they ate of the tree of good and evil. And

their disobedience merited for them nothing but death and

disappointment. But God in His love and mercy reveals to us

what we must be believe and how we must live, not just by

asking us to recite certain statements of the creed, but by

plunging us into the Ocean of Mercy who is Jesus Christ. I

who sprang into life at the word of a loving Father am

destined for life everlasting, for glory with God. I say

this every Sunday, but am I ready to live it and seal my

life with an Amen that will take me all the way to glory?

22. Amen.

It’s been a wonderful Year of Faith, and we have spent the

greater part of the green Sundays of Ordinary Time after

Epiphany and Pentecost slowly moving our way through the

Creed. I have said it time and again, lex orandi, lex credendi, lex

agendi: how we pray influences how and what we believe and in

turn how we act. Most of you prayed the Creed the first

time when your parents, in awe at the miracle of your life,

wanted more for you and Christ made you a child of God and

an heir to heaven at Baptism. Maybe you had the Creed

prayed over you then, but you have been praying the Creed

over and over again for years now.

But there comes a time when, as St Paul tells the

Corinthians (1Cor 13.11), we must put away childish things. We

learned the Creed by memorizing it along with all of our

other prayers. Now we have to grow up, become an adult

Christian, and take responsibility for the words we pray.

We have to know why we pray them, what’s all behind the

words. Each one of us has the obligation imposed on us by

the Sacrament of Confirmation to learn as much about the

faith into which we have been fully initiated as possible.

Especially in this day and age, when distractions from and

assaults on our Catholic Faith are everywhere, none of us,

not one of us, can afford to be lazy when it comes to

knowing our faith. At the beginning of this Year of Faith,

we put the Catechism of the Catholic Church in the pews and I have

encouraged you to take it home and read it, give it to your

friends. This whole year we have offered all kinds of ways

to learn more about your faith: religious education for

children and adults, the apologetics course, retreats, you

always have the Adoration Chapel. But have you taken

advantage of all of these things, and of the time God is

giving you to pray and to learn more about your belief?

That prayer and belief are inseparable from each other.

We have done the Creed in Slow Motion. And sometime next

year, we will do the Mass in Slow Motion. Because I want

every single person who calls Prince of Peace their

spiritual home to fall in love with the public prayer of the

Church, the Sacred Liturgy, and especially to know why we

celebrate the Mass the way we do, according to the mind of

the Church and her glorious Roman tradition. But what we do

at Mass makes no sense if we don’t know why we believe what

we do about God, which is why we did this series first.

Now, you may have missed some of the series. They are

available on the website, and I am in the process of editing

them to publish them in a little book you can buy for your

own study and meditation, but more on that later.

For now, though, I want to focus on that third part of

the triad: lex orandi, lex credendi, lex agendi: the law of doing.

There is a reason why the Church seals her prayers, and the

Creed with one little word. It’s a weird little word. It

existed in Semitic languages even before Hebrew, and can

mean, so be it, to be firm, to confirm, faithful, to have faith, believe, and so it is.

It first appears in the Bible in Numbers 5.22 when the Lord

instructs the priests how to curse a woman caught in

adultery, who is bidden to say, “Amen, amen” to her

punishment. In the New Testament it appears 52 times, many

of those as Jesus solemnly intones, “Amen, amen” to mean

“truly, truly” before teaching some infallible truth.

This odd Hebrew word, whose roots are so ancient we do

not know where it comes from, passes over into Christian use

so early that Justin Martyr, who died in the year 150,

attests that it was said after the Eucharistic Prayer that

turned the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ.

And so it has remained, the response to our prayers in

faith, remaining all these centuries in its original

language. Saint Augustine in one of his sermons told his

flock, “What will we do in heaven? I answer that our whole

activity will consist in singing Amen and Alleluia . . . In

heaven, you will cry out amen and alleluia not simply with

sounds from your throat but with the devotion of the heart .

. . Those things that Paul said we see through a mirror as

in a riddle, we shall see with an inexpreesibly different

feeling of love. We will then shout, ‘Why it’s true!’ And

because we shall see the truth with perpetual delight, we

shall be moved to praise God by shouting alleluia!” (Sermon

362,1).