Several days ago we celebrated the Nativity of our Lord – His birth from the Blessed Virgin Mary – today we celebrate His Epiphany. The word Epiphany brings together two important ideas: light and knowledge. Light is something we almost take for granted: the human race used to be much more dependent upon natural light to perform daily activities. When the days became shorter, the kinds of activities that you could expect to do were different from when the days were longer. Summer and Winter were not just warmer and colder, but the change in the amount of daylight meant that you couldn’t work the same way all day every day of the year. Today we have enough artificial light to work almost the same way all year long – most people work on screens that produce their own light and it is only some combination of discipline, boredom, and exhaustion that make us set them aside. We get light from electricity, and we have a fairly extensive control over electricity so how much light the natural world is willing to provide us with at any given time hardly seems limiting.
Christ the King
Today we celebrate the culmination of time, and the final manifestation of the glory of Jesus Christ. Throughout our lives we catch glimpses of how God is guiding the course of the world, how He intervenes sometimes in very subtle ways. At the end of time, we will see clearly how intimately involved Jesus was in every movement of every human heart. Jesus is the King of hearts, the shepherd of souls, the new head of humanity – raising us who had fallen in Adam. He is the just judge who will decide if we will rise to share in His glory – fully divinized by His grace – or rise only to plunge deeper into death in hell. He is the merciful judge who draws even closer when we stray. As our head, he proceeds us into heaven – He is a shepherd whose body is composed of sheep. When one is lost or stolen, it is a wound in His flesh that he seeks to heal and recover.
Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
As we approach the end of the liturgical year, the readings bring our focus to the end that lies ahead: the end of our earthly lives, the end of the world and the final judgment of God. At first glance, today’s first reading is about how to be a good wife, but mixed in are various comparisons that seem archaic and need further explanation. First, it is crucial for us to remember that whenever the Scriptures – whenever God talks to us about husband and wife, He is talking to us about His relationship with with His people, with humanity. One of the most serious consequences of allowing our understanding of marriage to be destroyed by the decadence of the modern world, is that it destroys God’s message to us about His love and commitment towards us. In this first reading, God is telling us, through the image of a good wife, about who the Church is for Him. The Church is the bride of Christ, the good wife that He has been seeking since the dawn of creation when He tells us that, “a man leaves his mother and father and cleaves to his wife.”