The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Genesis 3:9-15,20  +  Ephesians 1:3-6,11-12  +  Luke 1:26-38
December 8, 2020

“Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.”

In the beginning, God had a plan.  God’s plan was for mankind to live a blissful life in this world, and at the end of that earthly life, to rise body and soul into Heaven.

But mankind did not cooperate.  You know how Adam and Eve brought sin into the world.  They did not cooperate with God’s plan, and so God came up with a “Plan B”.  In this “Plan B”, God would show His love for mankind by sending His only Son to earth, knowing that man would crucify this Son, yet also knowing that the Crucifixion of His Son would destroy the power of sin and death.

In God’s “Plan A”, one man and one woman were to begin God’s plan.  They failed.  Adam and Eve instead brought sin and death into human experience.  Adam and Eve changed a human paradise into a valley of tears, full of suffering, doubt, and at time, even despair.

In God’s “Plan B”, one man and one woman were to begin God’s plan.  These two obeyed.  They fulfilled God the Father’s Will.  And so through there two—Jesus and Mary—you now have the opportunity to live a life here below filled with hope and joy.  Those virtues and all the rest of the virtues will be fulfilled in the perfection of Heaven if we cooperate with God’s grace to the hour of our death.

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Today the Church throughout the world celebrates the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Our Blessed Mother is the one creature in all of God’s Creation who obeyed God unfailingly.  Our Blessed Lady is the one human person who has been completely open to accepting Jesus into her life.  God knew that Mary would be such a woman before her life began.  That’s why He gave her a gift at the moment that her mother, St. Anne, conceived her.  God kept Mary from inheriting Original Sin, so that Mary would be the best possible mother for His Son.

We hear of Mary’s faithfulness in today’s Gospel passage.  “Gabriel was sent from God… to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph… and the virgin’s name was Mary.”  She asks how she, a virgin, can conceive.  But God’s messenger assures Mary that God’s Son will be conceived in her womb by the Power of the Holy Spirit.

Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus reflects God’s omnipotence.  God can create something out of nothing.  In the beginning, God created the universe out of nothing.  Similarly, in the nothingness of Mary’s virginity, God creates, and His Son is conceived as a human being in Mary’s womb.  But these two acts of God creating out of nothing—God’s creation of the universe, in the beginning; and God’s creation of Jesus’ human body and soul, in the fullness of time—both foreshadow an even greater miracle on God’s part.

Likely you have heard the saying, “The wood of the crib is the wood of the Cross.”  This saying isn’t literally—historically—true, but its truth lies in pointing out that Jesus’ conception and birth were a means to a greater end:  that end being Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.  As another saying puts it, “Jesus was born into this world, so that he might die from this world.”

Through Mary, God’s Son comes into the world to destroy sin and death.  Jesus’ vocation is fulfilled more than three decades later, according to the same pattern by which God created in the beginning, and in Mary’s womb.  God creates… out of nothing.  So it is with the Death and Resurrection of Jesus.  Human sin is a failure to love.  Human sin is an absence of grace, an absence of love.

You and I, as human beings:  how do we respond when someone doesn’t love us?  In our sinfulness, we usually respond in kind.  If someone gives us the cold shoulder, we do the same.  We respond to an absence of love with a further absence of love.  That’s how sin works:  it spreads like a spiritual and moral cancer, destroying the love that God meant, in the beginning, for our human life to be all about.

Thanks be to God, God does not respond to sin as you and I do.  If God did, then when we wandered far from Him, God would have (metaphorically) turned His back on mankind, and left us to wallow in sin, finally to die and exist forever separated from Him.  Thanks be to God, God responds to the nothingness of sin by choosing to love.  Down into the midst of a human race of sinners, God chose to send His only-begotten Son.  On Calvary, in the midst of the nothingness of rejection, rebuke, scourging and mockery, Jesus offered His life for the forgiveness of sin.  In the midst of the nothingness of sin, God “re-deemed” the world.

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Thanks be to God for His act of “re-creation”.  Thanks be to Our Blessed Mother Mary for saying “Yes” to her part in God’s plan.  And thanks be to God for preparing Mary to say “Yes” to His will for her life.  Those are the three truths that the Church celebrates today on this Holy Day of Mary’s Immaculate Conception.

First, God from all eternity, knowing that man would reject Him, planned to re-create the human world through the offering of His Son.  Second, God chose Mary to be the Mother of His only-begotten Son, and Mary chose perfectly to accept this vocation.  Third, knowing from all eternity of Mary’s fidelity, God prepared Mary for her vocation be means of a unique grace:  the grace that we call the “Immaculate Conception”, preserving her at the moment of her conception from Original Sin.

This gift was given to Mary not only for her own sake, but for the sake of her Son, and for the sake of all those who would become members of her Son’s Mystical Body, the Church.  You and I celebrate Mary’s fidelity today because she is our Mother.  We honor her as the first and best disciple of Jesus Christ.  We also honor her because of the unique gift of holiness that God gave her through her Immaculate Conception.  During this Season of Advent, Mary’s life shows us best how to receive Jesus into our lives.

Monday of the Second Week of Advent
Isaiah 35:1-10  +  Luke 5:17-26
December 7, 2020

The desert and the parched land will exult; the steppe will rejoice and bloom.

In today’s First Reading from the thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, “the desert” is a focus.  This focus is apt for the first two weeks of Advent, when St. John the Baptist is so often at the forefront of the scripture passages we hear.  The desert, after all, is where John the Baptist dwells.  In the desert he carries out his ministry of preaching and baptizing, both of these for the sake of repentance.

Yet in spite of the desert’s connection with solitude and penance, and as fruitful as points can be for our Advent meditation, today’s First Reading describes the desert for a different purpose.  Isaiah describes the desert for the sake of illustrating, in a phrase, the “reversal of fortune” that the Lord’s merciful love will effect when He comes.

The desert is a place where little to nothing grows.  Yet when the Lord come, “the parched land will exult”, “will bloom with abundant flowers, and rejoice with joyful song.”  This is not the only reversal of fortune that Isaiah foretells in this passage.  Through the Lord’s power “the eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared”, and “the lame leap like a stag”.  The Lord brings life to what seems dead, as the birth of Jesus offers hope for new life to fallen man.

Saturday of the First Week of Advent
Isaiah 30:19-21,23-26  +  Matthew 9:35—10:1,5,6-8
December 5, 2020

… they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.

This morning’s Gospel Reading bears imagery that foreshadows Lent, the Sacred Triduum, and Eastertide.  Catholics instinctually understand that Advent prepares Christians for Christmastide, and that Lent prepares them for Eastertide.  Less understood is that Advent and Christmastide, considered as a single block of time, prepares Christians for Lent and Eastertide.

The evangelist tells us that the crowds were “like sheep without a shepherd”.  Jesus, of course, is the Good Shepherd [see John 10:11,14].  His noblest act of shepherding took place on Calvary, when He sacrificed His life for His flock.

Jesus’ vocation of Self-sacrifice on Calvary is the chief reason why God the Father sent His Only-Begotten to earth.  It’s important not to lose sight of this during Advent and Christmastide.  God the Father sent His Son to be both shepherd and sheep.  Indeed, He shepherds us by becoming one of the sheep:  by being born as one of us, so that on the Cross He could offer to the Father the sacred humanity He received from the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Friday of the First Week of Advent
Isaiah 29:17-24  +  Matthew 9:27-31
December 4, 2020

The Lord is my light and my salvation.

Advent corresponds roughly with the final weeks when the day grows shorter (at least, in the Northern Hemisphere).  There’s a great deal of imagery in the scriptures and liturgies of Advent that relates to the human struggle with darkness.  For example, the feast day of Saint Lucy—whose name comes from the Latin word for light, and whose feast is celebrated in many countries with a brilliant display of candles—falls close to the midpoint of Advent.  On the following day the Church celebrates the feast of St. John of the Cross, a Doctor of the Church whose writings explore the “dark night of the soul”.

The refrain to today’s Responsorial is:  “The Lord is my light and my salvation.”  To reflect upon the Lord God Himself as “light” is infinitely more significant than reflecting upon the earth’s annual descent into darkness, or even upon the human darkness that one experiences while undergoing spiritual purification and growth in the divine virtue of faith.

The notion of the Lord God as light transcends any other notion of light that human persons experience.  One way to appreciate this difference is to notice how Psalm 27 continues its description of the Lord.  This Lord whom the Psalmist has just described as “light” is the object of the Psalmist’s sight.  Consider how unusual that is.

In ordinary human life, light serves to illuminate physical objects.  A man would be thought odd if he stared at a light bulb, and reckless if he stared at the sun.  But in Psalm 27 the Psalmist describes the Lord as the focus of his sight:  “One thing I ask of the Lord; / this I seek: / To dwell in the house of the Lord / all the days of my life, / That I may gaze on the loveliness of the Lord / and contemplate his temple.”  One might consider these verses as the Old Testament’s clearest description of what the Church calls the “Beatific Vision”.  To be a saint in Heaven is to gaze forever at the Lord, who is pure light.

The Second Sunday of Advent [B]
Isaiah 40:1-5,9-11  +  2 Peter 3:8-14  +  Mark 1:1-8

In the desert prepare the way of the LORD!

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references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church cited for this Sunday by the Vatican’s Homiletic Directory:

CCC 522, 711-716, 722: the prophets and the expectation of the Messiah
CCC 523, 717-720: the mission of John the Baptist
CCC 1042-1050: a new heaven and a new earth

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Baskin-Robbins used to advertise that they sold 31 flavors of ice cream.  You could have a different flavor every day of the month!  On the Baskin-Robbins website, the company states that since 1945, they’ve produced over one thousand, three hundred flavors.  It’s difficult to imagine that ice cream could come in that many different forms.

During the Season of Advent, one of the virtues that the Church sets before us—both for us to reflect upon, and for us to put into action—is the virtue of humility.  One of the potholes that we might fall into, however, is thinking that there’s only one form of humility:  that humility looks the same within each person.  It doesn’t!

The Season of Advent sets before us several models of humility.  During your daily time for prayer and reflection, you might over the next few weeks consider each of these models of humility, one at a time.  Each can help you meditate upon what changes you could make in your life in order to make your life look more like the lives of these models of humility.

Who are these models of humility?  The four chief models of Advent humility are:  St. John the Baptist, St. Joseph, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Obviously that order is in order of increasing humility.  Yet the first of the four is first for another reason, also:  because we have to begin with the example of St. John the Baptist.

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Today’s Gospel Reading focuses upon John the Baptist.  This passage is the first eight verses of St. Mark’s account of the Gospel.  It’s telling that St. Mark chose John the Baptist to be the first person he describes in his Gospel account.  St. Mark describes John first, not Jesus, because we need John’s message in order to receive Jesus.

The message of John the Baptist is founded upon humility.  Everything about John speaks to humility:  from the place where he dwells—a desert—to his clothing—camel’s hair and a leather belt—to his diet of locusts and wild honey.  But John’s message is even humbler than his dwelling, clothing, and diet.  His message demands that those listening make themselves humble.

John’s message is a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”  St. Mark the Evangelist goes on to describe this further:  how people “were going out to [John the Baptist] and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they acknowledged their sins.”

This act of humility—acknowledging one’s sins—is the first step to accepting the gift of Jesus.  Every year about this time, you hear the saying that Jesus is “the reason for the season”.  True enough.  But what’s the further reason?  That is to ask:  why was Jesus born in Bethlehem?  Why did God the Father send His only Child from Heaven down to earth?

Did God the Father send His Son to earth in order to teach?  There are many world religions that recognize Jesus as a great teacher:  on a par with other religious teachers such as Buddha, or Mohammed, or Confucius, they claim.  But God the Father did not need to send His Son from Heaven in order to teach mankind.  He’d been doing that for centuries through the prophets of the Old Testament.  God the Father could have dropped down copies of the Sermon on Mount from Heaven if He had wanted to.  Teaching was not the chief reason for God the Son to be born at Bethlehem.

The chief reason is summed up in a little saying:  “The wood of the crib is the wood of the cross.”  Or there’s another saying that expresses the same insight:  “Jesus was born in Bethlehem so that he could die on Calvary.”  “So that he could die.”  What God the Son, as God, could not accomplish from Heaven is to die in order to wash away both your sins, and the punishment that your sins merit.  That’s why if you won’t acknowledge your sins as St. John the Baptist demands, you won’t be able to accept Jesus as the gift that God the Father sent Him to be for you.

The Preaching of John the Baptist by Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1598-1657)

Thursday of the First Week of Advent
Isaiah 26:1-6  +  Matthew 7:21,24-27
December 3, 2020

“… only the one who does the will of my Father ….”

The Apostle Paul is sometimes quoted in order to create a false division between faith and good works.  St. Paul makes clear—so it’s said—that salvation in Christ is based upon faith alone.  Good works play no role—so it’s said—in reaching salvation.

Against such misappropriation of St. Paul’s words we have the explanation of Jesus in today’s Gospel Reading.  “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”  Should we take Jesus’ reference to someone saying, “Lord, Lord” and equate it with faith, which some say alone bears salvation?  One might argue that point, and it’s a point worth debating.

However, one cannot doubt that Jesus in today’s Gospel Reading is making a sharp contrast.  Nor can one doubt that when Jesus declares that only the one who does the will of His Father will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus is speaking about the performance of good works.  At the same time, we ought to be precise about Jesus’ words about this point:  in order to be good works, works must be done according to the will of God the Father.  Not just any old good works will do.

Finally, we ought to note something about those who say to Jesus, “Lord, Lord”.  Jesus doesn’t say here, and the Church does not teach, that salvation is reached by good works alone.  Note whom Jesus is speaking about when He declares:  “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven.”  He is speaking about a general set of people:  all those who say to Jesus, “Lord, Lord.”  Within that set, there is a smaller sub-set.  Among those who say to Jesus, “Lord, Lord”, only those who also do the will of God the Father will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

During this holy season of Advent, then, our good works can help us not only prepare one day to enter Heaven, but also to celebrate Christmastide fittingly.  This celebration begins with allowing the newborn Christ to bring us from Heaven a bit of His divine life.

Wednesday of the First Week of Advent
Isaiah 25:6-10  +  Matthew 15:29-37
December 2, 2020

For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain.

The first and last phrases of today’s First Reading are identical:  “on this mountain”.  The First Reading is taken from the twenty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, and “this mountain” that the Advent prophet describes bears a two-fold meaning.  “This mountain” refers to the earthly reign of the Messiah, and also to His heavenly Kingdom.

A mountain is a fitting place for the earthly Messiah to bestow His blessings.  After all, as we hear in Isaiah 11, the Messiah is “set up as a signal for the nations”, which the “Gentiles shall seek out”.  What better place for a signal to the nations than a mountaintop?  The higher the mountaintop, the farther away it can be seen.

The second meaning of “this mountain” is the Messiah’s kingdom in Heaven.  When a human person looks up at the night sky, he can—weather permitting—see the moon and other “heavenly bodies”.  These same objects in “the heavens” can be seen simultaneously by persons at very distant points upon the earth.  An example of this would be the Christmas narrative of the wise men travelling to Bethlehem by the light of a star.

All the more, though, is eternal Truth a lodestar for mankind.  Truth abides not in any “heavens” seem from the vantage point of earth.  Truth abides in Heaven itself, and from that eternal Heaven God the Father sent His Son—who is the Truth—to become man in order to proclaim the Truth in words and works.  The divine person of Jesus speaks and acts to redeem fallen man and to lead him to the eternal Heaven.

Tuesday of the First Week of Advent
Isaiah 11:1-10  +  Luke 10:21-24
December 1, 2020

The root of Jesse, / set up as a signal for the nations, /The Gentiles shall seek out ….

Today’s First Reading is taken from the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, the prophet of Advent.  In this rich passage of only ten verses, Isaiah foretells:  the coming of the Messiah, the gifts with which this Messiah is anointed; and the extent of this Messiah’s kingdom upon earth.

Isaiah describes the Messiah who is to come in earthly (in fact, earthy) terms.  At the start of today’s First Reading we hear that “a bud shall blossom” from the roots of Jesse.  This Jesse, of course, is the father of King David, who himself was the greatly earthly king in Israel’s history.  Yet a greater king lay in Israel’s future.  David would be surpassed in glory by one of his own descendants.

The glory of this future king is connected to the gifts described in the next verses of Isaiah 11.  “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon” the blossom of Jesse’s roots.  This Spirit, who of course is the Holy Spirit, bears manifold gifts, including wisdom and understanding, counsel and strength, knowledge, and fear of the Lord.  The Messiah to come—the glorious successor of King David—not only bears these gifts but wills to extend them to the members of His Kingdom.

But who will populate this Kingdom?  To what ends will this kingdom extend?  Isaiah uses imagery from the animal kingdom to illustrate how the Messiah will reconcile those who seem natural enemies:  the wolf and the lamb, and the cow and the bear.  This imagery helps us understand the final verse of the First Reading.  “The Gentiles shall seek out” the “root of Jesse,” which will be “set up as a signal for the nations”.  Already on this third day of Advent, the Church points our attention to her celebration of Epiphany, which itself foreshadows the great feast of Pentecost.

St. Andrew, Apostle
Daniel 7:15-27  +  Luke 21:34-36
November 30, 2020

“And how can they hear without someone to preach?”

There are many things about a man entering the seminary that are misunderstood.  One important point that many people do not understand is that a man enters the seminary in order to continue to discern the calling that the Lord has made to him.  He does not enter the seminary because he has already made a decision to be a priest.

The Lord calls out to every young man, “Come after me….”  What differs from one man to another is the phrase that follows “Come after me….”  For some, the words that follow are “Be my faithful disciple, and serve me wherever you go in the world.”  To others, Jesus says those words by which we hear him calling Simon and Andrew:  “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.”  The prayer that a man offers while in the seminary asks the Lord for help in clarifying just which call it is that the Lord has made to him.

“Fishers of men.”  This is a metaphor, of course:  one that speaks to Simon and Andrew, whose lives as adults had been given to the livelihood of being fishermen.  Regardless of the livelihood which they had chosen for themselves, the Lord’s words mean “Come after me.  I chose you to be the servants of my Church.”  No matter the Christian, and no matter the vocation to which the Lord calls him or her, the root of each vocation is service.