Tag: Incarnation

Beati qui non viderunt.

(Adapted from a homily for the feast of Saint Thomas.)

“Unless I see the mark of the nails in His hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.” With such words, Thomas the Apostle states his position on the re-appearance of Jesus, His Master, whom he had followed from Galilee to Jerusalem and death. And while Thomas is often described as “the doubter”, his condition for belief teaches us something important about the faith we share with him: it is incarnational. Our faith in God is not a matter of “pure spirit”: it is faith in the God-made-man, Jesus of Nazareth. It is not a matter of small or accidental importance that we believe in “Jesus Christ”, as our Creeds give us to say. Our belief is not in an invisible God, but in a God who came down to earth, who became truly one of us in order to save us. This Jesus, a man among men, is in fact the Son of God. But He is the Son of God made man, and it is the Incarnation that is the pivot point of history and the crux of our faith.

“The Son of God became a son of man so that man might become a son of God.” (To quote Saint Irenaeus, another saint whose feast falls today.) The Incarnation is essential for our Christian faith, because it is essential for our salvation. It was by the Incarnation that human nature was restored to its original dignity, and indeed elevated infinitely beyond that original dignity, for in being joined to the Divine Son, human nature is raised above even the angels. That human nature which the Son of God assumed at His Incarnation was the very nature by which He was able to undergo death for our salvation–God can’t die, but God-made-man can. And it was only because God had a body that God could have a bodily resurrection, of which resurrection Saint Paul says, “If Christ is not risen, your faith is in vain.” It is the Body of Christ that He gives us as food in the Eucharist, so that we Christians might be grafted into His Body and receive adoption as sons, so that we might truly become what we eat. The Body of Christ is essential to our faith.

And besides, it’s not surprising that Thomas wanted to be a member of the same cohort as the rest of the Apostles, to whom Christ “showed His hands and His side” on the evening of Resurrection Sunday, while Thomas was absent. Christ had granted a token of apostleship to the others, and Thomas earnestly desired to be counted in that number. Christ founded His Church upon an apostolic college that had truly witnessed the resurrection, and they would need this witness in order to bear that witness to the world. Thomas–the one who had urged the others to join him in going back to Judea with Jesus “to die with him” (John 11:16)–did not want to be “left out” of that apostolic band, and he knew exactly what was necessary in order to exercise his ministry. In yearning for the physical encounter with Jesus, he demonstrated the necessity of Jesus’ physical resurrection for His apostolic commission. Thomas wanted to be one of the Twelve after the Resurrection, as he had been before. As he had wanted to be united to Christ in death, so also he wanted to be united to Christ in resurrection from the dead.

The physical reality of the object of our faith–Christ’s physical and resurrected Body–shows us that the observance of our faith must also be physical. Jesus used his Body to offer perfect worship to God, and the Apostles understood that they were to imitate that mode of worship. “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God,” urges Saint Paul. Indeed, our physical offering “is [our] spiritual worship.” The body and the soul are not two distinct realities, but a single whole, by which we join our whole selves to God. This is why authentic Christian worship is physical as well as “spiritual”. This is why we gather as an assembly for Mass, and why we use deliberate postures in our prayer. This is also why the Christian faith has always held the physical creation to be fundamentally good. God created it! And that means that things like alcohol, food, and sex are good! We use wine in order to consecrate the Eucharist, and marriage is a sacrament! But these things are good inasmuch as we offer them as sacrifice to God, inasmuch as we use them for the purpose God intended. The converse of the principle that physical things matter for good when we direct them to the proper worship of God is that they also matter for evil when we abuse them. This is obvious in the abuses of drunkenness and gluttony and lascivious sexual behavior. But it holds true for every created physical thing. And since the Fall has produced disorder in our physical desires, we do well to worship God by offering Him our bodily mortifications. We abstain from meat on Fridays in honor of Christ’s death. We fast. We deny ourselves physical pleasures and willingly endure physical discomfort as an offering to God of our whole selves. Indeed, the mode of the Christian life must be patterned on the martyrs, who offered their whole lives to God in sacrifice, in imitation of their Divine Head. The Apostles teach us this lesson from the very beginning. And the lesson begins from the encounter with the truly-risen Christ in the Upper Room.

And yet, the lesson Thomas teaches is not complete. When Jesus does appear to him and draws him into the encounter he so desires, he demonstrates true faith. For faith is placed in that which is not seen. Faith is in what is not physical. “My Lord and my God!” Thomas saw the body, and he confessed the divinity. He believed in what he could not see, and for that, he serves also as the model for our faith. For we who have not even seen Christ’s Body (except under the veiled signs of the holy Eucharist) are indeed included in His blessing. We too confess Him as Lord and God, who have believed in the testimony of His witnesses. And we need have no fear of being relegated to some lower rank in God’s kingdom just because we happened not to be present in first-century Judea. We are blessed by Christ with the same faith as the Apostles held. We believe what the Apostles believed, and for the same motive: Jesus Christ, the God-man, has demonstrated His power on earth, and we have believed that He is indeed “the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

(I gratefully acknowledge catholicexchange.com, whose site hosted a reflection on Saint Thomas’ faith that spurred some of my own thoughts in this post.)

“His name is John.”

(Adapted from a homily for the feast of the Nativity of S. John the Baptist.)

We moderns can have a bit of trouble understanding the deep seriousness of this scene. We often conceive of baby names as being determined mostly by what sounds good to the parents, or goes well with the last name, or simply something interesting, a talking point for other parents when we introduce our babies. The more pious among us may seriously consider saint names for our children, to give them friends and intercessors as they grow up. Here in this episode from Luke’s gospel, we have what seems to be a typical moment: “We’ll name him Zachariah Junior.” There’s nothing wrong with that. But Elizabeth rejects the name, choosing “John” seemingly out of thin air. So they go to his father, her husband, who has been mute for these nine months, ever since that very strange episode in the Temple, when he went in to perform his priestly ministry and came back out dumbstruck, having seen some sort of vision. “His name is John,” he writes.

The Jews had a strong understanding of the meaning of names. We lose this aspect in English, because most of our names don’t “mean” anything. They might be associated with social figures, or have a certain “ring” to them, but very few names in English have any actual meaning as English words. For the Jews, though, names were usually a shortened version of a whole sentence. “Joshua” means “The LORD saves,” and “Elijah” means “My God is the LORD.” Incidentally, “Zachariah” means “The LORD remembers.” This is a fine name for the elderly priest whose prayers for a son were finally answered. The LORD had remembered him in his distress. But it was not to be the name for the miraculous son. Something new is happening here. “His name is John.”

“John”–the English spelling of a Jewish name that would have been something more like “Yohanan”–means “The LORD has given grace.” For the LORD has indeed given grace. The time of the prophecies is fulfilled: the time of the Messiah and His kingdom is at hand. The LORD sends his grace into the world, and not only His grace, but His very presence, incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary. No longer do the prophets foretell One who is to come, but they rejoice in His arrival. The last and greatest of the prophets, the one who had the privilege to see his Lord with his own eyes and point him out with his own hand, this John has already received grace by the Lord’s arrival. He is washed clean of the stain of sin inherited from our first parents by his rejoicing act of faith from within his mother’s womb. And by the prophetic spirit of the son, the mother and father also prophesy. “His name is John.”

With that declaration, the father’s mute lips are opened, and he sings a song of praise of the LORD, the God of Israel, who has at long last “visited His people and set them free.” He has remembered His covenant: that the children of Abraham might be set free to worship Him in uprightness and truth, without fear of enemies, because He Himself has come to dwell among them and redeem them from their ancient slavery, not merely of physical bondage to the Egyptians and Babylonians, but to the enemy of our souls, Satan and his ensnaring bonds of sin. Our God has set us free, Zachariah chants: note the past tense. By His incarnation, the Son of God has already begun the work of redemption and salvation. Mankind, joined to the divinity in the Person of Jesus, is already sanctified, though the full effects of that sanctification will have to wait for the Passion and Resurrection. No longer is the world waiting for a savior: He is come. The LORD has given His grace. And so, this boy must be named to indicate that: “His name is John.”

The Baptist gives us a model, too. He was cleansed of any stain of sin from before he was born, and the tradition of the Church holds that he committed no personal sin while on earth. Jesus Himself testifies to this, saying, “among those born of women none is greater than John.” He had no sin of his own to atone for on earth. And yet his entire life was spent in penance and self-denial. He was drawn into the desert by the Spirit of God, who trained him in the life of prayer and mortification. He ate bugs and honey, wore rough clothing, slept in caves, and denied himself the company of other men. He did this, not because he himself was a sinner, but precisely because he had received God’s grace of sanctification. In the face of that immense gift, he recognized his own unworthiness to receive it. He humbled himself before the great God who had loved him. God’s love and grace did not preclude John’s response of humility–indeed, they elicited it. So it is with us, who have not kept ourselves sinless, and have received even greater gifts of grace than John did. We deserve to do even greater penance for our sins that we ourselves have committed, while John had no sins to repent of. We have received the gifts of baptism, Eucharist, and conformity to Christ in His Church, and the least member of Christ’s Body, having received the grace of the New Covenant, is greater than even the greatest one under the former covenant. And so we too ought to devote ourselves to lives of penitence and mortification. We do so not only for our own sins, but out of gratitude to our infinitely-loving Father who has sent His Son into the world to be our peace and reconciliation. We do so in order to express our recognition of His greatness and our unworthiness, and to give witness to our faith that the grace of God is received by a humble heart. But, paradoxically, we humble ourselves as an act of thanksgiving for already having received that grace. For God’s grace goes before us: it is He who has converted us to Himself. “He has visited His people and set them free.” He has shown us His grace. And this is why “His name is John.”