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Were our Hearts Not Burning? (Lk 24:32)
Homily
St. Paul’s on the Lake, Saturday, December 18, 2004 and Sunday, December 19, 2004 Fourth Sunday of Advent, Cycle A
Contemplate Hope by Listening to Revelation
Today is a great day of hope for the Church, especially for us Catholics who live here in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Three men were ordained to the holy deaconate today, and in six months or so whey will be made priests. Two of them were ordained for the Archdiocese of Detroit. I know all three of the new deacons, great men, each worth their weight in holiness, virtue and zeal for the salvation of souls. To a world that has been long since fed up with Catholicism, to a world that shakes its finger at the Church for the many sins her sons and daughters commit, to a world that falsely thinks it has the higher intellectual ground than the Church, to a world that on the one hand promotes every form of perversion while on the other hand condemns the misconduct of scandalous clergy, these men have stepped up, like flowers sprouting out of quagmire, and said, “Here I am, Lord, send me!” It gives us hope, and inspires us to surrender ourselves more to the hard path of the Cross, the only path to life and happiness, a path pounded out by the meek footsteps of our Lord Jesus Christ. How good it is that there are reasons for hope, especially during this advent. I have been inviting the whole parish, all through advent, to meditate on hope, to fill their lives with hope, to pray and think and breath this virtue. On the first Sunday of advent, we defined hope: the theological virtue, infused by God, through which we expect to attain grace in this life and heaven in the next, and by which we expect God will bless us with the means to attain these things. We also mentioned hope’s enemies: sin provides us with a hopeless life, as does the inordinate love of the things of this world, which I called “false hopes.” The second Sunday, we discussed the secondary goods that come with this hope, such as justice, peace, and endurance. Last Sunday, we looked at the causes of our hope, which are basically the promises of God who is faithful to his Word. Today, the final Sunday before this Holy Celebration of the Birth of our Lord, we need to look at hope one more time, contemplating the goods we hope for. And we will do this by examining some of the details of the story of Joseph narrated to us by the Apostle Matthew (Mt. 1:18-24). Joseph at first was, in this passage, the man without hope. He saw that his betrothed wife was with child, even though they did not live together. He did not know that this woman, Mary, was the one prophesied in the Book of Genesis as the enemy of the serpent. He did not know she was the one Isaiah spoke about when he said, “The Lord Himself will give you this sign: the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel,” a name that means, “God is with us.” Because God had not yet given him faith, it was impossible for him to have hope. And so it is with us: it is impossible for us to hope when we live with our backs to God. There’s no reason to hope, separate from him. Without God, we have no savior: we have no one to save us from our sin, to free us from our evil habits, to satisfy our deepest longings of love. And so we turn to things that are less than God to fill in the void in our heart, only to find that these things can’t take God’s place in our lives, and we wind up confused, frustrated, continually thinking out new attempts to solve the problem of our existential happiness. This is exactly where Joseph was. But then something happened. “The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream.” Only then, when God sent him a special revelation, did he understand that things were not at all what they appeared to be. Mary was not guilty of adultery. The Holy Spirit created the child in her womb. When he heard the angel, he understood, and he believed. Furthermore, notice the name that the angel assigned to him: Jesus. Jesus was a contemporary version of the name Joshua, a name meaning savior. The Son of God came into the womb of the virgin Mary, and Joseph, his legal father, was to name him Savior. All of a sudden, he saw Mary and her baby in a different light. Mary was the mother of the savior. And a savior had been sent by God. He would not save them from political oppression or poverty or the cross: he would save them from their sin, making this salvation far greater than anything the world could ever hope for. Suddenly, Joseph was the man of hope. He passed from hopelessness to hope, and he did so because of the light of God’s revelation. His response to God was that of joyful obedience. He “did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him.” Obedience is therefore the most appropriate sign of a life full of hope. Today many things lure us away from obedience to God and the Church. The world has many different points of view about religion, about philosophy, about marriage and marital relations, about things such as contraception, about our forms of recreation, about the use alcohol, about the Sunday obligation, about Liturgical observance, about the relative good of possessions and wealth. When the Church calls all of us to the “obedience of faith,” asking us to obey the content of sacred Scripture and sacred Tradition, it is because the Church wants us to have hope. In this obedience, in the obedience of Joseph to the angel, in the obedience of Mary to the will of the Father, in the obedience of Jesus Christ first in becoming man and second in dying for us on a cross, there is salvation and the only path to hope. Therefore, as we approach Christmas, let us contemplate the hope to which we are called by spending more time reading God’s word in the sacred Scriptures. Cultivate your hope by listening to revelation, just like Joseph. Let us spend more time in prayer. Kneel before the manger scene with your family each night before going to Bed, and pray. Expose yourself to God’s revelation, and listen as Joseph did, and all your life will be filled with joy. Your darkness will become light. Your sorrows will be full of joy. Your sufferings will be full of meaning. And you will enjoy the interior, deep happiness and peace of all the saints, who in heaven await with us the liturgical celebration of the birth of our savior and our God. |