Category Archives: Christology

What time of the year was Jesus actually born? Is Christmas pagan? -Jer 10:1-4


-by Jimmy Akin, “A Daily Defense

Do environmental conditions contradict what the Gospels claim?

CHALLENGE: Christians are wrong to celebrate Christmas on December 25. Jesus couldn’t have been born then. It would have been too cold for the shepherds to keep their flocks outdoors (Luke 2:8).

DEFENSE: There are several problems with this challenge.

First, the Catholic Church celebrates Jesus’ birth on December 25, but this is a matter of custom rather than doctrine. It is not Church teaching that this is when Jesus was born (note that the matter isn’t even mentioned in the Catechism).

Second, although most Christians today celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25, this was not the only date proposed. Around A.D. 194, Clement of Alexandria stated Christ was born November 18. Other early proposals included January 10, April 19 or 20, and May 20 (Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, 2nd ed., §488, §553). By far the most common proposals, however, were January 6 (ibid., §§554-61) and December 25 (ibid., §§562-68).

While the last was eventually adopted by the Catholic Church for use in its liturgy, the fact that the Church did not declare alternate proposals heretical shows the matter was not considered essential to the Faith.

Third, the proposals that put Jesus’ birth in the colder part of the year (November 18, December 25, January 6, and January 10) are not ruled out by the fact that there were shepherds keeping watch over their flocks at night.

Ancient Jews did not have large indoor spaces for housing sheep. Flocks were kept outdoors during winter in Judaea, as they are elsewhere in the world today, including in places where snow is common (search for “winter sheep care” on the Internet). Sheep are adapted to life outdoors. That’s why they have wool, which keeps body heat in and moisture out.

Sheep are kept outdoors in winter in Israel today: “William Hendricksen quotes a letter dated Jan. 16, 1967, received from the New Testament scholar Harry Mulder, then teaching in Beirut, in which the latter tells of being in Shepherd Field at Bethlehem on the just-passed Christmas Eve, and says: ‘Right near us a few flocks of sheep were nestled. Even the lambs were not lacking. . . . It is therefore definitely not impossible that the Lord Jesus was born in December’” (ibid., §569).

The Prophecy of Immanuel

Could the Gospel writer have misunderstood the Old Testament prophecy?

CHALLENGE: Matthew misunderstands Isaiah’s prophecy of Immanuel (Isa. 7:14). It doesn’t point to Jesus.

DEFENSE: Matthew understands the prophecy better than you think.

The biblical authors recognized Scripture as operating on multiple levels. For example, Matthew interprets the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt as a fulfillment of the prophetic statement, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” In its original context, it is obvious the “son” of God being discussed is Israel: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt, I called my son” (Hos. 11:1).

Matthew understood this. He had read the first half of the verse and knew that, on the primary, literal level, the statement applied to the nation of Israel. But he recognized that on another level it applied to Christ as the divine Son who recapitulates and fulfills the aspirations of Israel.

In the same way, it is obvious in Isaiah that on the primary, literal level the prophecy of Immanuel applied to the time of King Ahaz (732-716 B.C.). At this point, Syria had forged a military alliance with the northern kingdom of Israel that threatened to conquer Jerusalem (Isa. 7:1-2). God sent Isaiah to reassure Ahaz the alliance would not succeed (Isa. 7:3-9) and told him to name a sign that God would give him as proof (Isa. 7:10-11).

Ahaz balked and refused to name a sign (Isa. 7:12), so God declared one: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. . . . For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted” (Isa. 7:14-16).

For this sign to be meaningful to Ahaz, it would have to be fulfilled in his own day—indeed, very quickly. It therefore points, on the primary, literal level, to a child conceived at that time (perhaps Ahaz’s son, the future King Hezekiah).

This was as obvious to Matthew as it is to us, but—like the other New Testament authors—he recognized the biblical text as having multiple dimensions, so the prophecy was not only fulfilled in Ahaz’s day but also pointed to Christ as “Immanuel” (Hebrew, “God with us”).

Is Christmas Pagan?

From Saturnalia to Sol Invictus, there is no shortage of theories

CHALLENGE: Christmas is based on a pagan holiday.

DEFENSE: There are multiple responses to this challenge.

First, which pagan holiday are we talking about? Sometimes Saturnalia—a Roman festival honoring the god Saturn—is proposed. But Saturnalia was held on December 17 (and later extended through December 23). It wasn’t December 25.

Another proposal is Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (Latin, “The Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun”), but the evidence this was the basis of the dating of Christmas is problematic. The Christian Chronography of A.D. 354 records the “Birthday of the Unconquerable” was celebrated on that date in 354 AD, but the identity of “the Unconquerable” is unclear. Since it’s a Christian document that elsewhere (twice) lists Jesus’ birthday as December 25, it could be the Unconquerable Christ—not the sun—whose birth was celebrated.

Second, correlation is not causation. Even if Christmas and Sol Invictus were both on December 25, Christmas might have been the basis of Sol Invictus, or the reverse, or it might just be a coincidence. If you want to claim the date of Sol Invictus is the basis for the date of Christmas, you need evidence.

Third, that evidence is hard to come by. Even if the Chronology of A.D. 354 refers to Sol Invictus being celebrated on December 25, this is the first reference to the fact, and we know some Christians held that Jesus was born on that date long before 354 AD.

For example, St. Hippolytus of Rome (c. 170-c. 240) stated in his commentary on Daniel that Jesus was born on December 25, and he wrote around a century and a half before 354 (see Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, 2nd ed., §562). Further, Sol Invictus wasn’t even an official Roman cult until 274 AD, when the Emperor Aurelian made it one.

Fourth, if Christians were subverting Sol Invictus, we should find the Church Fathers saying, “Let’s subvert Sol Invictus by celebrating Christmas instead.” But we don’t. The Fathers who celebrate December 25 sincerely think that’s when Jesus was born (ibid., §§562-567).

Finally, even if Christmas was timed to subvert a pagan holiday, so what? Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, and celebrating the birth of Christ is a good thing. So is subverting paganism. If the early Christians were doing both, big deal!”


-by Joseph Heschmeyer, a former lawyer and seminarian, he blogs at Shameless Popery.

“Why do we celebrate Christmas on December 25? There are popular theories that the December 25 dating was a Christian response to the pagans’ feast of Saturnalia or of Sol Invictus, but neither of these theories seems to work out historically.

Saturnalia, an ancient Roman feast, was celebrated on December 17. That later stretched into a week of festivities lasting until the 23rd, but it doesn’t explain why Christmas would be on the 25th.

What about Sol Invictus? According to this theory, the Emperor Aurelian instituted a celebration of the god Sol on December 25, 274 called Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (“Nativity of the Invincible Sun”). But there are serious problems with this theory as well. The University of Alberta’s Steven Hijmans argues that the theory “lacks even the most basic respect for internal logic and cohesion” by imagining that the Romans willingly “downgraded the old and hallowed Roman cults in favor of a new and oriental one” in the 270s, but then fought to preserve this new sun religion against Christianity fifty years later. As with Saturnalia, the Sol Invictus theory poses basic calendar problems as well, since

December 25 was neither a longstanding nor an especially important official feast day of Sol. It is mentioned only in the Calendar of 354 and as far as I can tell the suggestion that it was established by Aurelian [emperor for 270-275] cannot be proven. In fact, there is no firm evidence that this feast of Sol on December 25 antedates the feast of Christmas at all. The traditional feast days of Sol, as recorded in the early imperial fasti, were August 8, August 9, August 28, and December 11.

Although the Emperor Aurelian did introduce agones, athletic contests to be held in Sol’s honor every four years, these were held from October 19 to the 22nd, with the 22nd being (apparently) the highest feast day to Sol.

A century and a half before the first written record of a nativity feast for Sol Invictus, we find Christians citing the 25th of December as the likely day of Jesus’ birth. Their reason for doing so was fascinating. As Cdl. Ratzinger pointed out in Spirit of the Liturgy, “astonishingly, the starting point for dating the birth of Christ was March 25.” That is, Christians didn’t start with focusing on December 25. They began with March 25 and worked from there.

So what was so special about March 25? Tertullian, around the year 197, writes that Christ died on the cross “in the month of March, at the times of the passover, on the eighth day before the calends of April.” The “calends,” the root of our word calendar, is the first day of the month, and so Tertullian’s claim is that Jesus died on the 25th of March. St. Hippolytus of Rome agrees, adding that he was born on December 25:

For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th [eight days before the kalends of January], Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, but from Adam, five thousand and five hundred years. He suffered in the thirty-third year, March 25th [eight days before the kalends of April] Friday, the eighteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, while Rufus and Roubellion were consuls.

That’s from his Commentary on Daniel, dating back to perhaps 204. All of this is well before the as yet unborn Emperor Aurelian is claimed to have introduced Romans to the cult of Sol Invictus. As the University of Birmingham’s Candida Moss explains:

The real reason for the selection of Dec. 25 seems to have been that it is exactly nine months after March 25, the traditional date of Jesus’ crucifixion (which can be inferred from other dates given in the New Testament). As Christians developed the theological idea that Jesus was conceived and crucified on the same date, they set the date of his birth nine months later.

But this still leaves one major question: where did Christians come up with “the theological idea that Jesus was conceived and crucified on the same date”? Some scholars have speculated that it’s connected with Jewish thought (and that may be true), but the evidence points elsewhere. We get a hint at the answer from St. Augustine, who writes in De Trinitate:

For [Jesus] is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before nor since. But he was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th.

Augustine is highlighting a fascinating detail about the Passion narratives in the Gospels that almost all of us miss. Three of the four Gospel writers point out that the tomb in which Jesus was laid was new. St. Matthew tells us that “Joseph took the body, and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud, and laid it in his own new tomb” (27:59). St. Luke describes it as a tomb “where no one had ever yet been laid” (23:53), and St. John calls it “a new tomb where no one had ever been laid” (19:41). Why would that detail matter to the evangelists? Because it showed the tomb as uniquely set aside for God. Hagios, the Greek word for “holy,” refers to something “set apart by (or for) God, holy, sacred.” The tomb is holy, preserved exclusively for Christ.

This is also how the early Christians understood Mary: that she was, both in body and soul, uniquely set apart for God. The last eight chapters of Ezekiel are a prophecy of a coming temple, a prophecy referring not to a physical building, but to the body of Christ (see John 2:18-22; 7:37-39). Around this temple was a gate, and “this gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it; for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut” (Ezek. 44:2). The early Christians, including Augustine, saw this as an obvious reference to the perpetual virginity of Mary.

That’s not the way many of us read Scripture today. Chances are, we’ve glossed over the details of the temple gate and the virginal tomb without giving them a second thought (assuming we’ve bothered to read Ezekiel 44 and the Passion narratives at all). But until we learn to chew on Scripture the way the early Christians did, their settling on December 25 as the likely nativity of Our Lord will seem arbitrary . . . or we’ll fall victim to discredited theories about Saturnalia and Sol Invictus.”


-by Steve Weidenkopf

The celebration of Christmas draws the most comparisons to pagan rites, such as those commemorating the winter solstice, and specifically ancient Roman celebrations for the gods Saturn and Sol Invictus. These comparisons even influenced the Puritans, who rejected the celebration of Christmas as “Foolstide.” Puritan influence in the United States kept the nation from recognizing Christmas as a federal holiday until 1870.  

The feast of the Roman god of agriculture, Saturn, was a two-day celebration of the end of the planting season and was known as the Saturnalia. During the reign of Emperor Augustus (r. 27 B.C.-A.D. 14) the festival would begin on December 17, but that date was later moved by Emperor Domitian (r. 51-96) to December 25. By the second century A.D., the celebration encompassed an entire week. 

The cult of Sol Invictus (the “Unconquered Sun”) was introduced in 274 by Emperor Aurelian (r. 270-275), but it was not associated with an annual event. Although the date for the celebration of Sol Invictus’s birthday was December 25—a date sometimes reckoned as the winter solstice in the ancient world—the only documentary source for that date is a fourth-century illustrated calendar for a wealthy Christian known as the Chronography of 354.

It is easy for skeptics to claim that Christmas was borrowed from paganism, because Scripture does not provide a date or even a time of year for Christ’s birth. But the lack of calendar specificity in the Bible does not prove that the Church decided to “baptize” a pagan celebration with the Nativity of the Lord. There is no early Christian or pagan writing that indicates that December 25 was picked because of its correspondence with the Saturnalia or the birthday of Sol Invictus. In fact, early Christians went out of their way to demonstrate how different they were from the pagans. They recognized that the Nativity merited a place in the liturgical calendar, so by the third century, Christmas was celebrated on December 25 in the West and January 6 in the East.

Fixing the date for Christmas on December 25 had less to do with pagan custom, the winter solstice, or Sol Invictus and more to do with Jewish tradition than pagan custom. In Jewish tradition, March 25 was celebrated as the date of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, when the Lord promised to send a lamb to complete the sacrifice. It also marked the first day of the Creation, when God brought forth light. The early Christians easily recognized the connection between Christ the Lamb and the Light, and dated both his conception and death to March 25. If the Incarnation occurred on March 25, then it follows that the Nativity occurred nine months later on December 25. For the early Christians “the decisive factor was the connection of creation and cross, of creation and Christ’s conception,” not the desire to baptize pagan celebrations.”

-by T. L. Frazier

“Christmas is when the Church confesses the shocking scandal of the Incarnation. It is the scandal that the Second Person of the Trinity, the only Son of God, true God from true God and one in being with the Father, became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). As a witness to this profound mystery, Christmas has rightly held a lofty place among the feasts of Christendom.

Hans Urs von Balthasar suggests that heresy, beginning with Gnosticism in the first century, often has its roots in some denial of the Incarnation, in creating a dualistic divorce of flesh and spirit. This is the great stumbling stone. It’s so much simpler to enthrone Christ as the supreme spiritual being up in the celestial realms or to revere him as another wise teacher of moral precepts, but God and man simultaneously? This is a hard saying; who can accept it?

Difficulties notwithstanding, the Incarnation is for Christians the very measure of orthodoxy. Thus it’s not at all puzzling why sectarians such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Armstrongites, who deny this revealed truth, aren’t particularly fond of Christmas. Indeed, a Jehovah’s Witness can be disfellowshiped for celebrating the holiday, utterly cut off from friends and family. Yet there are even some within Protestantism (Jimmy Swaggart comes to mind), who gladly bear with Catholics the “scandal” that the child born of the Virgin is “Immanuel,” or “God with us” (Is. 7:14), but who are ambivalent toward the celebration of Christmas itself because of the holiday’s supposed “pagan” overtones. Still there is one thing that tends to unite those who do and those who decline to celebrate Christmas: a regrettable ignorance about the origins and meaning of the season.

Like the Jews, the early Christians saw time as something sanctified by God, and they too developed a liturgical calendar. For example, we know from a controversy involving Polycarp (70-156 AD) that the feast of Easter was regularly celebrated at least as early as the second century. Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna who, Irenaeus (130-202) tells us, had “known [the apostle] John and others who had seen the Lord.” He had traveled to Rome toward the end of his life to persuade Pope Anicetus to adopt the practice of the churches in Asia Minor of celebrating Easter on the fourteenth of the Jewish month of Nisan (the “quartodeciman” date). One of the problems with this was that the fourteenth of Nisan doesn’t regularly fall on a Sunday, and the rest of the Church insisted on celebrating Easter on the day of the week the Lord had risen. During the pontificate of Pope Victor I (189-198), the dispute became so heated that he threatened to excommunicate all of Asia Minor over the issue.

Early Christian worship often used the customs and symbols associated with the paganism around it. One instance: The fish was a symbol of fertility in the ancient world and of eroticism in particular for the Romans. This pagan symbol became one of the most important symbols of the Church, the Greek word for “fish,” ichthus, becoming a condensed confession of the faith. The five Greek letters are an acrostic of the statement, “Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter,” which translates as “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”

Court ceremonies were adopted for the Christian liturgy, sending the message to the pagan world that Christ was its true emperor. Since the days of Nero emperors had been employing the term kurios, a Greek word meaning “Lord,” as a distinctive title to promote the cult of emperor worship. Domitian (emperor from 81-96) had himself declared “Lord and god” (Greek: kurios kai theos; cf. John 20:28), and from then on the title became a favorite of the emperors. In contrast, Christians made a point of renaming the Roman “Day of the Sun” (Dies Solis, Latin for “Sunday”) as kuriakos hemera (Greek for “the Lord’s Day”; cf. Rev. 1:10), just as “July” had been dedicated to Julius Caesar and “August” to Augustus Caesar. The point was lost on no one and fueled tensions between the Christians and pagans.

The confrontational posture which Christianity adopted toward paganism is found behind the feast of Christmas as well. It was customary in the Hellenistic world to celebrate publicly the birthdays of important people such as emperors and princes, much as we do today with President’s Day. Christians couldn’t very well observe the birthdays of dead emperors while neglecting the risen Lord. What sort of witness would that give the unbelieving world? Not only that, but a celebration of the birth of Christ would fortify the Church against heretics like the Gnostics, who denied that Jesus was a historical, embodied personage.

The problem, though, was that the exact day of Christ’s birth was unknown, so a date on which to celebrate it had to be chosen arbitrarily. Now the pagans already had a fixed festal schedule, so any day of the year the Church chose to celebrate a feast would be a day of some pagan celebration. Here was an opportunity for the Church to confront paganism, and so it aimed at one of the biggest and most important cults in Rome. The day chosen was December 25, when everyone celebrated the pagan feast of the dies natalis Solis Invicti, “the birthday of the Unconquerable Sun.”[Though the Church doesn’t claim that Jesus was actually born on December 25, opponents of Christmas spill considerable ink arguing that Christ couldn’t have been born at this time. The reason is because of credulous people like Setsuko, “a devout Catholic for 36 years.” This Japanese woman, now a Jehovah’s Witness, relates, “It was painful to be faced with Bible truths that refuted my beliefs. I even had alopecia neurotica, loss of hair due to being upset. Gradually, however, the light of truth shone into my heart. I was stunned to learn that Jesus could not have been born in a cold, rainy December, when shepherds would not be tending their sheep out in the open night (Luke 2:8-12). It shattered my image of the Nativity, for we had used cotton wool as snow to decorate scenes of sheep and shepherds” (Awake!, December 15, 1991, 7). But Setsuko presumably knows better now, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society having explained to her that “Jesus died at the time of the Jewish Passover, which commenced April 1, 33 C.E. [Actually, it occurred on April 3, 33, not April 1.] Moreover, Luke 3:21-23 informs us that Jesus was about 30 years of age when he commenced his ministry. Since this lasted three-and-a-half years, he was about 33-and-a-half years old at the time of his death. Christ would have been a full 34 years old six months later, which would thus be about October 1. If we count back to see when Jesus was born, we reach not December 25 or January 6, but October 1 of the year 2 B.C.E.” ( The Watchtower, December 15, 1990, 4). Assuming that Jesus didn’t die on April 7 or 8 in 30 (as scholars suggest), and that he began his ministry precisely on his thirtieth birthday and not a few months later, and that his ministry lasted exactly three and a half years to the day, this theory could sound plausible–but still iffy.].

December 25 arrives around the time of the winter solstice, when the days get shorter and the sun seems to be “dying.” After the winter solstice, the sun appears to regain its strength, is “born again” as it were, as the days become longer. Consequently, December 25 was the “birthday” of the Persian sun-god known as Mithras, originally one of the lesser demigods of the Zoroastrian religion. Mithras had become the principal Persian deity by 400 B.C. and his cult quickly overran Asia Minor. According to Plutarch, it was introduced into the West around 68 B.C., and became quite popular among the Roman legions.

Unlike those of other Oriental gods introduced into the Empire, the cult of Mithras remained independent of official foundations to finance and propagate it. Its followers worshiped in small groups in subterranean shrines where the clergy employed special effects to make Mithras appear to “manifest” himself among the congregation. Such artifice, which included fireworks, special lighting and mechanical devices, rarely disappointed the religion’s adherents and provided Christian polemicists with some of their best material.

The conflict between Christianity and Mithraism had always been intense, possibly because of certain similarities between the two. The devotees of sun worship tended to be monotheistic. The cult stressed a personal experience of worship, though it excluded women. Originally, as a Zoroastrian demigod, Mithras personified justice and redemption. Later on, as part of a “mystery religion,” he came to embody all that was good which warred against evil. Mithraism had rituals that included a kind of baptism, a strong code of moral conduct, and the promise of an afterlife.

Christians, for their part, called Christ the “Sun of Righteousness” from the prophecy of the Resurrection in Malachi 4:2-3: “But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings. And you will go out and leap like calves released from the stall. Then you will trample down the wicked; they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day when I do these things, says the Lord Almighty.”

Inspired by Ezekiel 43:1-2, which speaks of the glory of the Lord coming from the east, Christians believed the Second Coming would be from the east whence comes the sun rising to dispel the darkness. After all, the world was in darkness till Christ, the light of the world, expelled the night. Consequently, Christians prayed toward the east on Sunday mornings, with crosses being painted on the eastern wall of house-churches.[One such cross was found in a house in the city of Herculaneum, which was buried in A.D. 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Tertullian, writing around 197 in his Apology, talks about Christians “praying in the direction of the rising sun.”]. When churches were built to accommodate Christian worship, these were also oriented toward the east. Christians were even buried facing the east in expectation of the final Trump.

By the second half of the third century, the cults of the classical gods were on the wane and paganism sought an infusion of new life from the Oriental cults. Thus Emperor Aurelian officially established worship of a Roman version of a sun god, under the name of Sol Invictus, as the principal cult of the empire on December 25, 274, after his victory over Zenobia, queen of Palmyra. He built a huge temple for Sol Invictus on the Campus Martius in Rome and made December 25 a national holiday.[Edwin Yamauchi cautions against too close an identification between Mithras and Sol Invictus: “The close identification of Mithras with the sun is seen in his titular, Deo Soli Invicto Mithrae, and its variations. . . . While Mithras was closely identified with Sol Invictus, it was the latter that was formally recognized and not the former. Mithras never appears on imperial coins. The sole public example of imperial devotion to Mithras is the dedication by Diocletian at Carnuntum in 307. Mithraism was a competitor of Christianity. . . . But Mithraism was not as potent a rival as the cult of Sol Invictus” (Persia and the Bible [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990], 519). While Mithraism may have taken a back seat to Sol Invictus, still it grew to such an extent that, by the time of Constantine’s conversion, there were fifty Mithraic temples in Rome alone(Desmond O’Grady,Caesar, Christ, & Constantine: A History of the Early Church in Rome[Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 1991], 20.)]. But Providence had different plans for the empire

. After Constantine’s battle for the Milvian Bridge on October 28, 312, which delivered Rome into his hands, and the Edict of Toleration in February 313, the pagans witnessed the previously “divine” emperor kneeling before the true “Lord and God.” Christ was now ascendent, having vanquished Sol Invictus in the battle for supremacy in the empire. As expressed in a fourth-century work, De solistitiis et aequinoctiis, concerning Christ’s “Unconquerable Birth”: “Who is as unconquered as our Lord, who overcame and conquered death?” And although the cult lingered on (Augustine would later speak of the crying and shouting of the pagans on December 25), Sol Invictus was doomed to fade into permanent eclipse. Not even Julian “the Apostate,” Constantine’s nephew who came to the throne in 361, was able to re-impose paganism on the Empire, try though he did.

Unlike the battle for the Milvian Bridge, the battle for religious supremacy was not to be won overnight, especially in the rural areas where paganism was most entrenched. In the first half of the fourth century the worship of the Sol Invictus was the last great pagan cult the Church had to conquer, and it did so in part with the establishment of Christmas, which proclaimed that “when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman” (Gal. 4:4). At the head of the Deposition Martyrum of the so-called Roman Chronograph of 354 (the Philocalian Calendar) there is listed the natus Christus in Betleem Judaeae (“the birth of Christ in Bethlehem of Judea”) as being celebrated on December 25. The Deposition was originally composed in 336, so Christmas dates back at least that far.

The most pressing issue within the Church in the fourth century was its conflict with Arianism, which denied the divinity of Christ and thus the Incarnation. This long and bitter conflict, as well as that with the Nestorians [This heresy is named after the fifth-century patriarch of Constantinople who denied that the Virgin Mary could be called the “Mother of God,” instead asserting she could only be the mother of Christ’s human nature, not his divinity. Not comprehending that a mother gives birth to a person and not a nature (in this case, the divine Second Person of the Trinity), he essentially claimed that Mary bore only a man loosely united to God, not the single and undivided Second Person who became God and man simultaneously at the Incarnation. Significantly, Nestorius chose to attack Mary’s divine maternity for the first time in a homily on Christmas Day 428.] later on, influenced the contents of the Christmas feast. Pope Leo the Great, combatting Arians (as well as Manichaeans) in the fifth century, seems the first to speak explicitly of Christmas as a celebration of the Incarnation, [Augustine, fifty years earlier, saw Christmas simply as a commemoration of a historical event, not as the celebration of a mystery (a revealed truth surpassing full comprehension) such as Easter. Still, while Leo may have been the first explicitly to connect Christmas to the Incarnation, it seems more than mere coincidence that the Church’s primary feast celebrating this mystery arose alongside Arianism at the beginning of the fourth century. One suspects a connection between the two], thus using Christmas as a bulwark against heresy.

During the Protestant Reformation, while much of northern Europe and England were arbitrarily throwing out “Romanist inventions,” one of the things that needed “reforming” was the liturgical calendar, along with many of the traditional customs that went with the feasts. It had been common to sing carols throughout the year on various feast days, especially processional songs honoring the saints associated with Christmas. The Reformation frowned upon carols and labeled them “papist” and superstitious. The Protestant monarchy of England banned all caroling except for at Christmas.

The Puritans outlawed Christmas itself when they came to power in England in 1642. Celebrating Christmas was considered evidence of “anti-religious,” Royalist sentiment. The Puritans were none-too-pleased that December 25 had been associated with Sol Invictus, and they suspected there were other dubious elements attached to the season as well. Harsh penalties were exacted for celebrating the holiday or even for staying home that day. The Puritans in New England banned Christmas as well; although the ban was eventually lifted, Christmas did not become a legal holiday in America until 1856.

Denunciations of “paganism” are still common from sects which have imbibed this heritage. Some are unabashedly bombastic in their trashing of Christmas, a 400-year-old puritanical tradition seemingly unhindered and unadulterated by progress. We are loudly informed that the customs of merrymaking and exchanging gifts have their real origin not in the rejoicing of the angels before the shepherds and in the gifts given by the Magi, but in the pagan festival of Saturnalia which was celebrated from December 17 to 24.

The lights and greenery are said to come from the Roman New Year of Kalends with its solar associations. It has even been maintained that “feasting and fellowship” were introduced by Teutonic Yule rites, as though feasting and fellowship were unknown to Christians before the conversion of the Teutonic tribes (cf. Acts 2:42, 46)! [See the Awake! (a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ publication) articles for December 22, 1992 (8-9), December 8, 1991 (12-13), December 22, 1990 (14), December 8, 1989 (13-16), and December 8, 1988 (17-19). The whole of their rejection of Christmas is based on pagan precursors to certain Christmas customs. This hostile attitude hasn’t always been the case with this sect. A former member of the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Raymond Franz, has reproduced in his latest book a rare photograph showing Judge Rutherford, the sect’s second president, and the rest of the Bethel staff celebrating Christmas in 1926, complete with tinsel, wreaths, and presents (In Search of Christian Freedom [Atlanta: Commentary Press, 1991], 149). It should be noted that this was seven years after Jesus Christ supposedly chose the Watch Tower Society as the only “untainted” organization on earth through which he would channel all religious truth]. Thus merrymaking, exchanging gifts, greenery, lights, feasting, and fellowship are all suspect because of their previous association with paganism, as if melancholy, selfishness, drabness, fasting, and anti-social withdrawal, the antitheses of these “pagan” customs, would be more appropriate for celebrating the birth of the Savior.

When the Pharisees criticized Jesus’ disciples for feasting and merrymaking, Jesus replied, “Can you make the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them; in those days they will fast” (Luke 5:34-35). Accordingly the Church feasts and makes merry at Christmas as Christ enters the world, and it fasts during Lent, preparing for his leaving it on Good Friday.

The popular myth concerning the pagan origin of Christmas trees exemplifies this puritanical phobia. In reality the Christmas tree tradition is derived from the Paradise tree, which was adorned with apples on December 24 in honor of Adam and Eve, whose transgression is reversed by the coming of Jesus, the Second Adam (Rom. 5:12-19), on the next day. The tree was originally a stage prop used in medieval German plays of mankind’s fall from grace, and in time people began the practice of having trees in their own homes on that day. Our contemporary custom of adorning Christmas trees with balls likely arose from those prop apples. [The Encyclopedia Americana (International Ed.) relates a widely held belief that it was Martin Luther who originated the custom of Christmas trees in Germany: “The sight of an evergreen tree on Christmas Eve, with stars blazing above, is said to have made a great impression on him, and he put up a similar tree, decorated with lighted candles, in his home” (Danbury: Grolier, 1991), 6:667. The first proper “Christmas tree” as such is found at Strasbourg in 1605.].

When shown there’s nothing to fear from Christmas trees, antagonists will cite Jeremiah 10:3-4 (King James Version, of course) to “prove” that God scorns them nonetheless: “For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.” The prophet is here condemning idolatry, but, taken out of context, the passage might seem to suggest someone cutting down a Christmas tree, nailing it to a stand, and decorating it with glittering baubles.

The Hebrew word huqqot, which the King James translators have rendered as “customs” in Jeremiah 10:3, is better translated in this verse as “statutes,” as in religious ordinances (Ex. 27:21, Lev. 18:3). The religion of the people is a delusion, says Jeremiah, and he then describes the construction of an idol which is similar to descriptions in other parts of the Old Testament (Ps. 115:4, 135:15; Is. 2:20, 31:7, 40:18-20, 41:7, 44:9-20, 46:5-7; Hab. 2:19). The tree was felled, carved, overlaid with silver and gold, and finally made sturdy by nailing it down to prevent it from toppling over (1 Sam. 5:1-4, Is. 41:7). In an exquisite touch of satire, Jeremiah describes the idol dressed in royal blue and purple garments (Jer. 10:9) as being “like a scarecrow in a melon patch” (v. 5). Unless one intends to accuse the person with a Christmas tree of idolatry, Jeremiah 10:3-4 is simply irrelevant to the issue. [Even Ralph Woodrow, who devotes an entire chapter to excoriating Christmas in his virulently anti-Catholic Babylon Mystery Religion (Riverside: Ralph Woodrow Evangelistic Association, 1966 [1990 edition], 145), concedes that Jeremiah 10:3-4 is taken out of context. “The people in the days of Jeremiah, as the context shows, were actually making an idol out of the tree, the word `workman’ being not merely a lumberjack, but one who formed idols (cf. Isaiah 40:19, 20, Hosea 8:4-6). The word `axe’ refers here specifically to a carving tool. In citing this portion of Jeremiah, we do not mean to infer that people who today place Christmas trees in their homes or churches are worshipping these trees.” Then what exactly does he mean by citing verses condemning idolatry when discussing the custom of decorating Christmas trees? “Such customs do, however, provide vivid examples of how mixtures have been made.” Woodrow doesn’t elaborate further].

Still, the vestiges of paganism found in Christmas festivities aren’t to be overlooked. Holly, mistletoe, yule logs, singing, cooking special foods, and decorating the home were all once associated with this time of year in the non-Christian world. Once converted, people did not think of banning these things. They continued to sing, eat big meals, and decorate their homes because these customs were viewed as intrinsically compatible with the new faith. It was paganism that Christianity opposed, not the culture of the people being evangelized. This is why, for example, we still exchange rings and throw rice at weddings even though these customs are holdovers from paganism. Indeed, the early Christians would never have used the fish as a symbol of Christ if they’d disdained everytoken of paganism.

Now we ask the big question: How should these mementoes of a bygone pagan era be regarded today? One possibility is to view them as the evidence of the Church’s victory over false gods, as stuffed heads adorning the walls of the hunter’s trophy room. Even as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is enshrined in Scripture for our instruction (2 Pet. 2:6, Rom. 15:4), so Christ’s victory over paganism is preserved in the memory of the Church.[The apostle Paul himself didn’t hesitate to draw upon elements of paganism, insofar as they were true in themselves, where it would assist in elucidating the gospel. He preached to the Athenians, “Yet [God] is not far from each one of us, for `In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your poets have said, `For we are indeed his offspring’” (Acts 17:28). The first quotation, scholars say, is based on an earlier saying of Epimenides of Knossos (sixth century B.C.). In the second, Paul is citing the Stoic poet Aratus of Soli (third century B.C.), and the saying is also found, in the plural, in Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus (third century B.C.). In Titus 1:12 Paul again cites Epimenides, who had been elevated to an almost mythical status by his fellow Cretans. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and others mention Epimenides as a prophet, which is why Paul cites him as “one of their own prophets.”].

Objections to Christmas aren’t confined to the pagan elements of the holiday, as evidenced by the antagonism to jolly old Saint Nick, who lacks heathen ties altogether, though some suspect even here a hidden Babylonian connection. The main complaint is that Saint Nicholas, alias Santa Claus, detracts from the purpose of the season, which ought to be centered upon Christ. Children can name all of Santa’s reindeer starting with Rudolph, but they grow up learning nothing of the central mystery of our redemption. This is a valid concern, yet we must take care not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water. There is benefit in contemplating the life of the historical “Santa Claus.”

Nicholas was the bishop of Myra in Lycia (southwestern Asia Minor) at the beginning of the fourth century. He’s remembered for his charity to the poor and has long been regarded in the West as the special patron of children, probably due to a tale about him reviving three children from the dead.

He is said to have suffered under the Diocletian persecution, been an opponent of Arianism, and been present at the Council of Nicaea. His death probably occurred at Myra in 342, and the Byzantine Emperor Justinian built a church in his honor at Constantinople in the suburb of Blacharnae during the sixth century. His feast day being December 6 explains his association with Christmas, though his reputed opposition to Arianism, a heresy rooted in the denial of the Incarnation, makes the connection quite fitting. Once understood, the life of “Santa Claus” is a model for us to follow.

Santa’s red suit is possibly derived from his eastern episcopal attire, though it was American cartoonist Thomas Nast, an anti-Catholic who let his prejudice be enshrined in his drawings, who in 1863 created the fur-trimmed suit we now associate with Santa Claus. Dutch settlers to America brought the custom of giving gifts to children on St. Nicholas’s Eve, and British settlers took over the tradition as part of their Christmas Eve celebration. The name “Santa Claus” is the Americanized version of the Dutch “Sinterklaas,” itself a modification of “Sint Nikolaas.”

Sometimes the objection is made, on the basis of the Protestant dogma of sola scriptura, that Christians ought not to celebrate Christ’s birth because nothing is said about doing so in the Bible. One might respond to this by way of the analogy with the Jewish feast of Hanukkah (also called the Feast of Dedication), an eight-day celebration (November/December) recalling the rededication of the Temple in 164 B.C. after the sanctuary had been taken over and defiled by pagans.

The only accounts of this feast’s institution are found in 1 Maccabees 4:36-59 and 2 Maccabees 10:1-8. Although these two books have always been regarded by the Church as Scripture (the Greek Septuagint being the accepted version of the Old Testament in the early Church), Protestants rejected these books as “apocryphal” during the Reformation. The only reference to Hanukkah outside of Maccabees is in John 10:22-23, where Jesus is celebrating the “Feast of the Dedication” in the Temple. The question may be asked, “If Jesus as a Jew was free to celebrate a Jewish feast whose institution isn’t found in the Protestant canon of the Old Testament, may not a Christian in the same vein celebrate the birth of his Lord, even if such a celebration is not explicitly commanded in the pages of Holy Writ?”

While observing Christmas won’t revive ancient sun worship or inspire Germanic tree-stump adoration, our present manner of celebrating Christmas isn’t beyond criticism. As has repeatedly been observed, an obsessive commercialism has swept aside much of the incarnational mystery which the season calls us to reflect upon. It isn’t the dead paganism of the past that should cause alarm, but neo-paganism as represented by secularism and the cult of materialism.

As von Balthasar observed, conflicts with evil begin and end at the manger: “And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her Child as soon as it was born” (Rev. 12:4). Yet Christmas epitomizes hope, for it assures us the battle already has been won by Christ’s invasion of our world. The message of the manger is really a declaration of war by God the Father “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age” (Eph. 6:12). The history of the Church shows us one ruler of darkness after another, from Sol Invictus to the present, being crushed by the radical mystery of Bethlehem.

The apostle John writes, “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world” (1 John 4:2-3). It is at the manger that the spirit of Antichrist is discerned and judged. It won’t be by the suppression of “feasting and fellowship” that we’ll triumph over the neo-paganism of modern Antichrists, but by joyously heralding the Lord Jesus Christ. Bringing the family together to pray, to read the Infancy narratives from the Gospels, and to attend church during Advent–these are our best spiritual weapons against this present darkness.

It was the Incarnation which gave our spiritual forefathers the confidence with which they defied the darkness of the first centuries. So it will be again for us. If we confront the world with the scandal of the manger, unbelievers who have walked in darkness will see a great light, and Christians will have the ruins of modern, secular deities to add to those of Sol Invictus as pagan ornaments for Christmases yet to come.”

Love, He comes!!!!
Matthew

Did Jesus claim to be God?

“The New Testament is replete with direct and indirect claims of Christ’s divinity. Perhaps the most famous is the beginning of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word and the word of with God and the word was God” (John 1:1-3). Jesus is the word made flesh (John 1:14). Jesus is God.

Nevertheless, people have struggled to find places where Jesus himself claims to be divine. If you’re looking for a passage in Scripture where Jesus says, “Hey, everyone, I’m God!” you’re not going to find it.

Jesus does make such a claim several times, but it isn’t easy for us to see today, because we are not familiar with the first-century Jewish context he draws upon, and since these claims are somewhat veiled to our eyes, people can reinterpret Jesus’ words to explain away his divine self-reference. While such words can be explained away, his audience’s reaction to Jesus’ words isn’t so easy to dismiss.

Unless your view of the ancient world comes from Monty Python, people didn’t carry stones in their pockets just itching to stone someone. The charge of blasphemy was serious, and stoning was against Roman law. Therefore, the reaction of Jesus’ original hearers provides a solid indicator as to whether he claimed to be divine.

The high priest’s response

One example that I take up in my book concerns the reaction of the Jewish high priest to Jesus’ response during his trial before the Sanhedrin. The text reads:

The high priest rose before the assembly and questioned Jesus, saying, “Have you no answer? What are these men testifying against you?” But he [Jesus] was silent and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him and said to him, “Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One?”’Then Jesus answered, “I am; and ‘you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.’”At that the high priest tore his garments and said, “What further need have we of witnesses? You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?” They all condemned him as deserving to die (Mark 14:60-64; see also Matthew 26:61-66).

At first glance, it appears that the high priest is overreacting. Where did Jesus blaspheme? Some suggest that Jesus claimed the divine name for himself when he replied, “I am” (see Exodus 3:14). Saying the divine name aloud in the first century would have been a serious offense, but we know this is not the case from the parallel passage in Matthew, where “I am” is given as “you have said so” (Matt. 26:64).

Another possibility is that Jesus’ affirmation to being the Messiah was itself blasphemous. This option is even less likely since most Jews believed that the Messiah would be a mere mortal. Claiming to be the Messiah, therefore, would not constitute a claim to be God.

Recalling Daniel

Why then did the high priest tear his robes in horror at Jesus’ words? Clearly, Jesus claimed something about himself that those present thought warranted immediate execution. But what? The answer may be found in Jesus’ use of the seventh chapter in the book of Daniel where the prophet receives a night vision and recalls:

As I looked, thrones were placed and one that was ancient of days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came forth from before him; a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the court sat in judgment, and the books were opened (Daniel 7:9-10).

Note that more than one throne was set up. One was for the “ancient of days,” namely, God, to sit upon, but what about the other? Keep this in mind as we continue with verse 13:

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed (Daniel 7:13-14).

In this passage, “one like a son of man” comes “with the clouds of heaven” and presents himself before God (the Ancient of Days) and receives universal and everlasting dominion over the whole Earth.

Who sits on the other throne?

These two passages together cause a certain amount of exegetical tension. If God is one, why set up more than one throne? Who sits on the other throne? Indeed, how can any creature be worthy to be enthroned next to God?

Babylonian Talmud illustrates this tension by recording a dispute between two rabbis who lived in the first decades of the second century:

“One verse of Scripture states, ‘His throne was fiery flames (Dan. 7:9), but elsewhere it is written, ‘Till thrones were places, and one that was ancient of days did sit’ (Dan. 7:9)! . . . “One is for him, the other for David,” the words of R. Aqiba. Said to him R. Yosé the Galilean, “Aqiba, how long are you going to treat in a profane way the Presence of God? “Rather, one is for bestowing judgment, the other for bestowing righteousness” (Hagigah 2:1a-e).

Rabbi Aqiba understood this passage to refer to two thrones: one throne for God and the other for the Messiah, the son of David. Notice Rabbi Yose the Galilean’s response to Aqiba’s interpretation “How long are you going to treat in a profane way the Presence of God?” However great the Messiah would be, according to Rabbi Yose’s perspective, being seated on a throne would be a profanation of the Divine Presence. Instead, he suggested, the two thrones should be understood as symbols for God’s judgment and the bestowing of righteousness.

Later in the passage, Aqiba eventually adopts this view. Others proposed that one throne was for God to be seated and the other was his footstool (Isaiah 66:1). In any case, the two thrones were for God alone. Another individual, even the Messiah, could not take the other throne without detracting from the glory of the one true God, since to be enthroned was to possess the authority to exercise dominion. It’s interesting that later rabbis did interpret Daniel 7 to be messianic, but they omit any mention of the thrones.

Jesus as “the son of man”

The prophet Daniel never tells us who sits on the other throne, but he does tells us that the “one like the son of man” presents himself before God (the Ancient of Days) and he receives an everlasting and universal dominion. Does this mean that the “son of man” is seated on the other throne? Daniel doesn’t say, but Jesus’ reply to the high priest does affirm this question: “I am; and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

The “son of man” does sit on the throne at the right hand of the Power (God) and comes with the clouds of heaven—and Jesus is that Son of Man who receives universal and everlasting dominion! No wonder the high priest tore his robes in horror. Jesus made himself equal to God.

To us who may not be familiar with the prophecies of Daniel, Jesus’ words seem to pertain only to his Second Coming without any reference to his divinity. The high priest’s reaction forces us to look deeper into the passage to find some warrant for his actions. In this case, the high priest is a hostile witness to the proper meaning of this passage.”

Love, He reigns,
Matthew

His Glory

“Melius enim iudicavit de malis benefacere, quam mala nulla esse permittere.”
“For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.
St Augustine

“O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem.”
“O truly blessed night!  This is the night in which, destroying the chains of death, Christ arose victorious from the grave. For it profited us not to be born if it had not profited us to be redeemed…”  “O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer!”
-“Exsultet” from the Easter Vigil

-by Father John Dowling, who is the pastor of St. Augustine Parish, Signal Mountain, TN. Father Dowling had been the pastor of Holy Ghost in Knoxville since 2014. His term at Holy Ghost was his second at the North Knoxville parish, having served there as associate pastor from 1987 to 1996 and as parochial administrator for the next year following the death of longtime pastor Father Albert Henkel. Father Dowling then became pastor of St. John Neumann in Farragut and was leading the parish when it constructed a large Romanesque church from 2006 to 2008. In February 2010, Father Dowling became pastor of St. Francis of Assisi in Fairfield Glade before his return to Holy Ghost.

A native of Savannah, Ga., Father Dowling also has a brother, Father Kevin Dowling, who is a priest in the Diocese of Nashville. Father John Dowling is a graduate of Notre Dame High School in Chattanooga who went on to work for five years in the marketing and sales department of the Chattanooga Coca-Cola Bottling Co. before entering seminary. He has written a number of booklets that include “Why Confess Your Sins to a Priest?” published by Liguori Publications in 1994. In 2005, the Fathers Dowling and Father Vann Johnston, now bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., received national honors for saving a father and two of his children from plunging over a waterfall while the three priests were on a hiking vacation in Montana.

“A doctor and canonized saint in the Catholic Church, Teresa of Avila, was making a perilous journey with other nuns and a priest to start a convent. Heavy rains turned into snow and sleet, the rivers were swollen, and the roads flooded. As they were going over a stream, the carriage swerved and stopped as it hung over the torrent. Afterwards, so the story goes, Teresa complained to the Lord about the perils that had been endured. He answered, “But that is how I treat my friends!” She replied, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.”

A crusty cousin of mine who had experienced a lifetime of hardships was told by her more pious sister, “Well, you know that God only gives sufferings to those Whom He loves.” The curt reply: “Well, I sure do wish he’d lose his crush on me!”

From the educated and saintly to the more down-to-earth Christian, the problem of suffering beckons each person to penetrate its mysteriousness and discover its meaning. In fact, suffering seems to invite exploration of our own transcendence. John Paul II notes that “It is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense ‘destined’ to go beyond himself, and he is called to this in a mysterious way.”

Frustration, failure, rejection, physical pain, suffering, and death are common human experiences. Although we encounter much of this early in life, deeper questions about the human situation are often postponed until later years when plans, goals, expectations, and relationships are characterized by a greater intensity. We begin to ponder why some people experience more than their fair share of suffering. But since our experience of others’ misfortune is not first hand, we continue to go about our daily activities without fully probing the significance of physical and moral evil. It is inevitable, however, that some event immediately affecting us will become the occasion for deeper reflection regarding the mystery of human suffering. Why should there be talk about a “fair share” of suffering? Why should there be any suffering at all? Indeed, why did God let me suffer this? This more penetrating inquiry into the mystery of suffering which results from personal experience is but a prelude to more profound questions about the meaning of suffering. Why would God decide to create angels and men with the freedom to make choices that could result in their eternal damnation when He could have created and placed them in a condition of eternal bliss from the beginning of their existence? Why would God, Who needs no one and is perfectly happy and fulfilled, decide to create angels and men whose freedom to choose will result in His own suffering and death?

The Catholic response to why God created the world can be summed up in two words: His glory. This glory, which is the very essence of his Being, is perfectly revealed through the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. In order to explain why this is true we must reject the temptation to limit our search to history and travel back beyond the cross, beyond the Fall, and beyond creation itself.

Certainly, we acknowledge that the cross was necessary to pay the debt the human race owed to God. In meeting sin and its consequences head on, Jesus, as the new head of the race, gives witness to the seriousness of sin. By His faithful obedience until death, he establishes a new covenant in order that a renewed and authentic humanity may receive and share the blessings and promises of the kingdom of God.

True as this perspective is, it begs the following questions. Why did God allow the first parents to break this relationship through sin? Indeed, why did He initiate this relationship at all? To begin to answer these questions, we must go back “before” time and “beyond” space to a God who is. As we delve into the inner life of God, we discover one who lacks and needs nothing. We encounter a God who is a community of persons, perfectly giving, receiving, and abiding in the oneness of his life and love. Then we ask, Why would God, who always experiences a total giving and receiving in a Spirit-breathed Father-Son relationship, want a relationship with men at all, much less one that He knows will be severed by sin?

The difficulty that one has in understanding a God who creates people who can freely choose to be forever separated from Him pales in comparison to the awareness that we are in the presence of a God who freely creates a world that He knows will choose to kill Him. There is no guesswork here. From all eternity, this all-sufficient God knows that his powerful act of creating will make possible an act of hatred and destruction against himself.

Here we reach the heart of the problem. To summarize the difficulty of the situation, we might put it this way: Why does God create, knowing the tremendous amount of suffering, both temporal and eternal, that will result from human choices, and the immeasurable suffering He will have to experience as a result of these same human choices, when He could have created everyone in heavenly bliss and prevented any suffering at all? Why would God, filled with life and love, decide to set in motion the necessary elements for his own death when He does not need that which He freely chooses to create? Ultimately, the question is not, why do the good die young, the innocent suffer or bad things happen to good people but why do bad things happen to a good God? To answer this fundamental question we must reflect on two possible alternatives to the way God chose to create.

Some wonder why God did not choose to create a perfect world where human beings would always be kind to one another. In this world there would be no need for forgiveness because there would be no possibility of sin. Everyone would always be loving. There would be no spiritual, emotional or physical pain. Then, after a predetermined time, God would simply take us to heaven where he would reveal the fullness of his glory and bestow upon us our eternal reward.

This scenario becomes problematic for two reasons. First, we cannot speak of an eternal “reward” if while on earth we could do no wrong-we had to do good. No one receives a reward for doing something over which he has no control. In addition, when men saw how beautiful the heavenly life was they would begin to ask the obvious question. If we had to do good while on earth, why did God waste our time placing us there? We could have been in heaven from the beginning. What was the point? People would begin to resent such a God who could have created them in the fullness of heavenly joy immediately-but did not. A heaven filled with people who doubt God’s wisdom and resent having lived a meaningless existence on earth would not be a perfect place.

Once the shortcomings of this “perfect” plan become obvious, we consider a second alternative. Why didn’t God simply create us in heaven from the very beginning? Certainly, this was possible. God could have given us bodies incapable of experiencing pain or death and souls filled with his divine life from the very first moment of our existence. Once filled with his most bountiful blessings, we would praise God forever. For all eternity we would realize that since we were created out of nothing, God’s power transcends human comprehension. Therefore, we would praise him eternally for his awesome display of might.

Since God does not need our companionship because He is perfectly fulfilled in His own Trinitarian giving, receiving and abiding, His generosity and internal freedom would be manifested by His decision to create. Since God alone is eternal, men would recognize that nothing outside of God could compel Him to create. It would be obvious to all that no interior or exterior force compelled God to create. We would praise Him forever for his most generous gift of life and magnificent expression of freedom. We would marvel that God could bring about such harmony in the midst of such diversity. Knowing how every.aspect of each person blends perfectly with all others would give us an overwhelming sense of security and comfort. We could rejoice for all eternity contemplating such a wise and providential God.

Still, although we who were created in heaven would truly appreciate God’s power, generosity, freedom, wisdom, and providence, we would forever ask the question, “How much does God’s creative power, generous freedom, inscrutable wisdom, and all-encompassing providence reveal about himself?” In other words, notwithstanding the power, generosity, freedom, wisdom and providence expressed in God’s creating angels and men in heavenly bliss, both would forever wonder if God’s life were greater still.

The most important question would still remain unanswered. “Does God love us? We know he created us and He didn’t have to. Yes, we know that He has the power to keep us in existence for-ever. Yes, we know that He can reveal to us exactly how we fit into his eternal plan.” But that which is most meaningful about a person’s identity would remain a mystery. Does this all-powerful and generous God who freely creates us according to a wise and providential plan truly love us? How would we ever know? What can God, Who has everything and can do everything, do to prove that He loves us? In order to express love it must cost the lover something. God seems to be in a dilemma since of His very nature he is incapable of losing anything. How can God prove His love when nothing causes Him strain or pain?

For all eternity God could say, “But look what I’ve given you here—billions of friends, beautiful scenery, effortless movement, immense power at your disposal and the freedom to explore my life forever.” Yet we would always wonder, “Yes, but what did it cost you? For that matter, what did it cost any of us? What sacrifice did anyone make in order for us to be here? There really is no evidence that you or anyone else in heaven is capable of love.” A heaven filled with people who doubt if God or others love them is not a perfect place.

God’s answer is to create a world that will nail Him to the cross. The author of life will experience death on a cross in order to reveal how deep love is. Why is this so? Anything short of death itself would fail to reveal the depth of God’s love.

Creation, miracles, commandments, prophets, and kings would all fail to reveal fully a love that has no bounds. Even Christ’s birth and public ministry would fail to reveal perfectly the height, breadth and depth of God’s love. But in Christ’s death, justice and mercy meet. By Christ’s sacrifice on the cross sin is conquered, death is swallowed up, order is restored and justice is applied through the love and mercy of one Who did not know sin and yet became sin so that we might become the very righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21). By accepting death on the cross (Luke 23:46), Christ fully embraces the infinite love and eternal plan of the Father for Himself and those “who have been called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28). By accepting death on the cross, Christ has revealed his sacrificial love for each one of us (Gal. 2:20). Through the humanity of Christ, and by reason of its union with the Word, creation is able to embrace and reflect the infinite love of God. As the Italian theologian Raniero Cantalamessa states in The Meaning of Christmas, “God wanted the Incarnation of his Son not so much to have someone outside Himself to love Him in a way that would be worthy of Him, as to have someone outside Himself to love in a way that would be worthy of Him, that is, without limit! . . . The Father had someone to love outside the Trinity in a supreme and infinite way, because Jesus is man and God at the same time.”

We now are prepared to understand the “necessity” of the cross of Jesus Christ. This is seen from two perspectives. First, from the perspective of human activity, God’s glory is more fully revealed in his handiwork, created and redeemed in Christ Jesus “for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph.2:10). Insofar as Jesus Christ is human, we acknowledge that, “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (Heb.5:8-9). In order to be identified with the Son as children of God, we must listen to God when he tells us “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?” (Heb. 12:7), “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him” (Rom. 8:17).

In light of the cross Jesus becomes the new head of a renewed and authentic mankind capable of making its own contribution to the work of salvation. Paul’s words confirm this: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, that is, the Church” (Col.1:24). This ability for one who suffers to cooperate with Christ in the building up of his body, the Church, under the influence of the Holy Spirit does not detract from but rather manifests God’s glory. Irenaeus summarizes this first perspective: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

Second, from the perspective of God’s self-revelation, by using the cross to redeem men and empower them to make their own contribution to the work of salvation rather than simply creating them in heaven, God better reveals his inscrutable wisdom. Everyone truly has his own place in the Father’s kingdom while at the same time realizing it has been prepared by Jesus Himself.

Moreover, the paschal mystery alone enables God to reveal His absolute freedom. No greater freedom can be imagined than that which is expressed by the all-sufficient God creating a world from which He could derive no benefit, knowing with certainty that He would experience the weight of the sins of the world and death by its hands as a result of his choice. By redeeming men through the cross, God reveals a power and a providence that go beyond creating something good out of nothing and sustaining it. The cross of Jesus Christ has the power to bring good out of evil. It is difficult to imagine how God creates out of nothing. Even more difficult to imagine and impossible to comprehend is how God is able to incorporate the human capacity to choose evil into a wisdom, providence, freedom, and power that guarantees the victory.

In the cross of Jesus Christ, God reveals a love that goes beyond benevolence. On the cross the worst evil history would ever know was committed. On the cross the greatest love history would ever know was revealed. On the cross God grants us sinners an eternal acquittal at the same time that we are giving him the death penalty. The cost of this love cannot be measured nor its quality enhanced. In Christ, because of the hypostatic union (Christ’s divine and human natures united in his divine Person), man has been given the capacity to accept all that the Father can give (John 5:20) and perfectly reveal the Father’s life (John 14:9, 17:7-8). Jesus, being the Word and truth, is the wisdom of the Father and is capable of expressing God’s mysterious plan while accepting this same mystery Himself and faithfully carrying it out. Ironically, by His sacrificial death Christ fully accepts and reveals the Father’s sacrificial love for the world (John 3:16). This death brings to fulfillment the meaning of the psalm that says, “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His saints” (Ps. 116:15).

Human suffering is indeed a mystery that never will be comprehended because it is related to the mystery of God’s love revealed through the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. Two passages from Paul help reconcile the Church’s teaching that the world is created for the glory of God with the mystery of human suffering revealed in the cross: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:19b-20), and, “For it is the God Who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ Who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).

The cross enables us to know a love and a power that go far beyond what the act of creating men in heavenly glory could reveal. It permits us to be drawn into an even deeper heavenly communion with a God who manifests his glory in such an extreme way. The more God reveals of His inner life, the more we can experience it. Rather than creating us in heaven God uses the cross to perfectly reveal his wisdom, freedom, power, and providence. It is God’s love and His merciful expression of that love which give the cross its radical power and conveys its ultimate purpose. Again, we call on Irenaeus as we summarize this second fundamental perspective: “The life of man is the vision of God.”

Because Jesus shares our humanity, the cross becomes God’s way of allowing us to cooperate in our own redemption. Because Jesus is one in being with the Father, the cross is God’s way of revealing a love the depths of which will take an eternity to explore. The Father’s “foreknowledge” of the love that the Son will embrace, empowering Him to abandon Himself to the Father’s will (John 6:38), to unite all things in Him (Eph. 1:10), and to present the kingdom to the Father “that God may be everything to everyone” (1 Cor. 15:28), is the ultimate reason why God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4).

Through the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, God reveals that “the glory of God is man fully alive” and “the life of man is the vision of God.” This revelation is anticipated at the Last Supper when Jesus says, “Now, Father, glorify thou me in thy own presence with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was made” (John 17:5). This revelation will reach its culmination with the Second Coming of Jesus, when God will be “everything to everyone” (1 Cor. 15:28). Between these two events stands the cross. The cross of Christ forever marks us as obedient disciples of Jesus who “consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18). It will enable a real communion of love to exist in heaven among people who have not simply been placed there by God but have loved one another joyfully, served one another faithfully, worked for one another tirelessly, prayed for one another, and contributed to one another’s salvation. Conversely, it will reveal the depth of meaning contained in the biblical phrase “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16) and, as the ultimate sign of contradiction, forever show why bad things happened to a good God!”

Love, His glory forever and ever!!!
Matthew

Flee to Jesus


-“Crucifixion”, by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1308-11), Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena, Italy


-by Br Luke VanBerkum, OP

“Flee to Jesus.

In the spiritual life, we are often tempted to adopt a “fix-it-myself” attitude. “If I just work really hard and overcome this habitual sin, then I’ll be holy enough to approach Jesus in prayer.” This attitude fundamentally misses the point.

In the first moment of temptation or in the realization of having committed a sin, we must flee to Jesus. There’s no need to do anything else first.

Where do we find Jesus? On the cross. It is hard to contemplate the cross, but that is where He awaits us. Jesus is on the cross, and He is there because of me. This can be taken in two ways.

First, we must face up to the reality that He is there because of me – Jesus is on the cross because of my sins. Facing the cross, we see exteriorly what the evil of sin truly looks like interiorly. Sin destroys, mutilates, shames. Fixing our eyes on the cross, we see how our sins are a true death, how we cannot heal our own wounds and, no matter how hard we try, cannot bring ourselves back to life. We cannot, however, merely call ourselves “sinners.” We must be “sinners who flee to Jesus,” for He is the one who heals us.

Thankfully, He is there because of me – Jesus is on the cross because He loves me. Dying on the cross, Jesus knew every sin that every person would commit and, in turn, merited each and every grace that He wishes to bestow on us. He died once for all two millennia ago, yet we must approach Him right now to receive that grace by which we are healed and restored to life. The cross is the source of life for us. When we approach Jesus on the cross, we find that the grace needed to heal a particular sinful habit or weakness has already been won for us.

Encountering the cross daily, then, is more than gracefully enduring those hardships that come our way unprovoked, whether at the hands of others, (our own), or because of physical ailments. Encountering the cross daily entails holding these two aspects of the cross together – the shame and disorder that our own sins cause as well as the love of Jesus. When we examine ourselves and accept in humility our complete inability to heal our weakness and sins, we find that we are truly contemplating the cross of Christ and seeking it for the life it bestows. As sinners who flee to Jesus, the very acknowledgment of our sinfulness and brokenness of heart is the action by which we find ourselves at the foot of the cross, the source of life. Try as hard as we might, we cannot fix ourselves.

We must flee to Jesus.”

Flee to Jesus; rest in His loving arms; rest, flee to Jesus. Lord, I rest/trust only, truly in You.
Matthew

Why is the Sacred Heart aflame?

“To Jesus Heart All Burning” traditional Catholic hymn


-by Stephen Beale, is a freelance writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. Raised as an evangelical Protestant, he is a convert to Catholicism. He is a former news editor at GoLocalProv.com and was a correspondent for the New Hampshire Union Leader, where he covered the 2008 presidential primary. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN and the Today Show and his writing has been published in the Washington Times, Providence Journal, the National Catholic Register and on MSNBC.com and ABCNews.com. A native of Topsfield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Brown University in 2004 with a degree in classics and history. His areas of interest include Eastern Christianity, Marian and Eucharistic theology, medieval history, and the saints.

“Images of the Sacred Heart meticulously recount key details of the crucifixion. The wounded heart itself, the crown of thorns, and the cross itself all appear. Some depictions even include the lance that pierced the side of Christ penetrating His heart.

But there’s one detail that seems out of place. There was no fire at the crucifixion, yet the Sacred Heart is often shown with flames. Why?

A burnt offering. Recall that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was mean to recapitulate and supersede all the sacrifices of the Old Testament. What was a common feature of these sacrifices? Fire. Think of the fire that devoured the sacrifices offered by Elijah and the fire that Abraham would have set had an angel not intervened (see 1 Kings 18 and Genesis 22). In ancient Israel, a burnt offering was the supreme form of sacrifice, it symbolized a total commitment to God—particularly the death of the victim animal and the all-consuming nature of the fire.  The burning Sacred Heart reminds us that this sacrifice too was incorporated into Christ’s supreme offering of Himself on the cross.

Symbol of divinity. Of course, fire is also a familiar Old Testament symbol of God. We encounter God’s fiery presence at Sinai and in the account of Ezekiel (see Ezekiel 1). This symbolism carries over into the Old Testament, where the Holy Spirit descends upon the heads of the apostles as tongues of fire. Perhaps it’s especially fitting that the Sacred Heart is burning given that from it poured water and blood, symbols of the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharistic wine, both the work of the Holy Spirit.

Symbol of the divine Incarnate. The fire burns, but the Sacred Heart is not consumed. Does this sound familiar? It recalls Moses’ first encounter with God, in a bush that burned but was not consumed. This foreshadowed the Incarnation, in which God assumed human nature, without his divinity extinguishing the humanity that had been assumed: Christ was fully man and fully God. It is fitting that at this climactic moment of the Incarnation that its deepest reality is reaffirmed in such an acute way.

Jesus’ passion for us. In the context of the gospels, the Passion refers to the suffering of Christ. But, in our society, we usually use the word passion to refer to something or someone that drives our enthusiasm, interest, desires, and commitments. Is this meaning still valid for the Sacred Heart? I think so. There is evidence in the gospels that a burning heart signified intense emotions. One clear example of this is the two disciples who encountered Christ on the road to Emmaus and afterwards remarked that their hearts had been burning. (cf Luke 24)  So yes, the flames on the Sacred Heart are a true reminder of God’s burning love for us.

Light of the World. Fire does two things. First, it consumes that which it burns. Second, it gives off light. This second aspect is certainly relevant to the symbolism of the Sacred Heart, given that Christ is the true light of the world. Remember that during the crucifixion, darkness descended upon the land (see Mark 15:33). In the darkest hour, the Sacred Heart burned bright with hope.”

Love, may the divine furnace of His love consume us,
Matthew

Attributes of the Sacred Heart


-Catholic holy card depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus, circa 1880. Auguste Martin collection, University of Dayton Libraries, please click on the image for greater detail.


-by Stephen Beale, is a freelance writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. Raised as an evangelical Protestant, he is a convert to Catholicism. He is a former news editor at GoLocalProv.com and was a correspondent for the New Hampshire Union Leader, where he covered the 2008 presidential primary. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN and the Today Show and his writing has been published in the Washington Times, Providence Journal, the National Catholic Register and on MSNBC.com and ABCNews.com. A native of Topsfield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Brown University in 2004 with a degree in classics and history. His areas of interest include Eastern Christianity, Marian and Eucharistic theology, medieval history, and the saints.

“The Sacred Heart is among the most familiar and moving of Catholic devotional images. But its symbolism can also be strange. As we mark the Feast of the Sacred Heart, here is a look at the explanation behind some of the features of the Sacred Heart.

The flames

The Sacred Heart most obviously brings to mind the Passion of Christ on the cross. There is the crown of thorns, the cross, usually atop the heart, and the wound from the spear that pierced His side. But why is the Sacred Heart always shown as if it’s on fire? That certainly did not happen at the crucifixion.

There are three reasons behind this. First, we have to remember that Christ’s self-offering on the cross was the one-time perfect consummation of all the sacrifices of the Old Testament. This necessarily includes burnt offerings, which were the highest form of sacrifices in ancient Israel, according to The Jewish Encyclopedia. An early form of such sacrifices was what Abraham set out to do with Isaac, hence the wood he had his son collect beforehand.

Second, fire is always associated with the essence of divinity in the Old Testament. Think back to the burning bush that spoke to Moses, the cloud of fire that settled on Sinai, and the flames from above that consumed the sacrifice of Elijah. This explanation fits with the gospel account of the crucifixion, in which the piercing of Christ’s side revealed His heart at the same time that the curtain of the temple was torn, unveiling the holy of holies where God was present.

Finally, the image of fire associated with heart represents Christ’s passionate love for humankind. One 19th-century French devotional card has these words arched above the Sacred Heart—Voilà ce Cœur qui a tant aimé les hommes, which roughly translates to: “Here is the heart that loved men so much.” One traditional exclamation is, “Sacred Heart of Jesus, burning with love of us, inflame our hearts with love of Thee.” We see this actually happen in the gospels, where the disciples on the road to Emmaus realized that their hearts had been “burning” after their encounter with Jesus.

The rays of light

Look closer at the image of the Sacred Heart. There is something else framing it besides the flames. They are rays of light. In John 8:12, Christ declares that He is the “light of the world.” In Revelation 21:23, we are told that in the new Jerusalem at the end of times there will be no light from the sun or moon because the Lamb of God—that is, Jesus—will be its source of light. Light, like fire, is a symbol of divinity. Think of the Transfiguration and the blinding light that Paul experienced on the road to Damascus. As the light of the world, Christ is also the one who “enlightens” us, revealing God to us. The Sacred Heart constitutes the climax of divine self-revelation, showing us the depths of God’s love for us.

The arrows

The crown of thorns and the spear make sense. But sometimes the Sacred Heart is also depicted with arrows. Again, that’s not something we find in the gospels. One explanation is that the arrow represents sin. This is reportedly what our Lord Himself said in a private revelation to St. Mary of St. Peter.  The arrow could also draw upon an ancient Roman metaphor for love, which, according to ancient myth, occurred when the god Cupid shot an arrow through the hearts of lovers.

The crown of thorns

Unlike the arrows, the crown of thorns is reported in the gospels. But in traditional images it encircles the Sacred Heart, whereas in Scripture the crown was fixed to Jesus’ head. One traditional account offers this interpretation, describing those who are devoted to it: “They saw the crown transferred from His head to His heart; they felt that its sharp points had always pierced there; they understood that the Passion was the crucifixion of a heart” (The Heart of the Gospel: Traits of the Sacred Heart by Francis Patrick Donnelly, published in 1911 by the Apostleship of Prayer). In other words, wrapping the crown around the heart emphasizes the fact that Christ felt His wounds to the depths of His heart.

Moreover, after the resurrection, the crown of thorns becomes a crown of victory. Donnelly hints at this as well: “From the weapons of His enemy, from cross and crown and opened Heart, our conquering leader fashioned a trophy which was the best testimony of His love.” In ancient gladiatorial contests, the victor was crowned. In the Revelation 19:12, Christ wears “many crowns” and believers who are victorious over sin and Satan will receive the “crown of life” (Revelation 2:10).

Finally, according to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, the seventeenth French nun who helped start (continued the tradition) the devotion, the points of the thorns are the many individual sins of people, pricking the heart of Jesus. As she put it in a letter, recounting the personal vision she had received, “I saw this divine Heart as on a throne of flames, more brilliant than the sun and transparent as crystal. It had Its adorable wound and was encircled with a crown of thorns, which signified the pricks our sins caused Him.”

The cross

Like the thorns, the cross is both rooted in the gospels but also displayed in a way that does not follow them in every detail. There is almost an inversion of the crucifixion. In the gospels, Christ hung on the cross, His heart correspondingly dwarfed by its beams. But in images of the Sacred Heart, it is now enlarged and the cross has shrunk. Moreover, rather than the heart being nailed to the cross, the cross now seems ‘planted’ in the heart—as St. Margaret Mary Alacoque put it—if to say to us that the entire reality of the crucifixion derives its meaning from and—cannot be understood apart from—the heart of Jesus. As Donnelly wrote, “The Heart [is] … forever supporting the weight of a Cross.” Truly, it is the heart of Jesus that makes the cross meaningful for us today.”

His love,
Matthew

Sacred Heart: Hos 11:8-9 & Ezek 36:26

My heart is overwhelmed,
my pity is stirred.
I will not give vent to my blazing anger,
I will not destroy Ephraim again;
For I am God and not a man,
the Holy One present among you;
I will not let the flames consume you.
—Hosea 11:8–9

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
—Ezekiel 36:26


Erin Cain

“The Heart of Jesus, pure and tender, feels all human emotions more intensely and yet is not ruled by them. His Sacred Heart is not hardened or cold like our own, and so the feelings He experiences are powerful and raw: love, anger, joy, pity, solace, grief.

When Jesus faced His crucifixion and brutal death, He knew that this was the Father’s will for the salvation of the world, but that doesn’t mean that He didn’t feel distressed or afraid or angry about what was to come—in fact, He felt all those things even more acutely than you or I would. His perfect Heart felt everything more distinctly, and yet He was able to feel those emotions without allowing them to dictate His actions. Jesus stayed the course and persevered for our sake, even as His Heart was filled with dread.

Sometimes, when our emotions distract us from carrying out our plans, we try to numb our hearts and stop feeling anything at all. But our hearts are a gift, to be nurtured and cherished, and if we lose touch with them we will find ourselves without meaning or purpose. So how can we persevere in God’s will as Jesus did without making ourselves numb to those inner cries of joy and anguish?

Only when we are connected to the Sacred Heart of Jesus will we perceive the immense graces that come from being in tune with our emotions and aware of how God formed our hearts. They are a compass for us as we discern His plans and seek to understand who He created us to be. We will see the beauty of our human emotions, even when they make it harder for us to do what is right. We will find the mysterious grace of sharing in Jesus’s sorrow, knowing that He walks alongside us in our pain. We will remember His Passion amidst our greatest joys and His Resurrection amid our deepest sorrows, and everything will be offered up to Him. Jesus will grant us the heavenly perspective that will allow us to press onward through all the ups and downs of this life, knowing that this is not the end.

Jesus invites each of us into His Sacred Heart. He has sacrificed for our redemption and cleansed us through Baptism, that we might enter into His Love and not be destroyed by the flames. May we offer Him our whole heart, holding nothing back, so that He might transform it like unto His own.”

Love, O Sacred Heart of Jesus, we place our trust in Thee!,
Matthew

Sacred Heart – Returning love for love

-by Rev Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen, OCD, Divine Intimacy, Baronius Press, (c) 1964

Presence of God – O Jesus, You have loved me so much; enable me to repay Your love.

MEDITATION

In the Encyclical Annum Sacrum, Leo XIII declares, “The Sacred Heart is the symbol and image of the infinite charity of Jesus Christ, the charity which urges us to give Him love in return.” Indeed, nothing is more able to arouse love than love itself. “Love is repaid by love alone,” the saints have repeatedly said. St. Teresa of Jesus wrote: “Whenever we think of Christ, we should remember with what love He has bestowed all these favors upon us … for love begets love. And though we may be only beginners … let us strive ever to bear this in mind and awaken our own love” (Book of Her Life, 22).

The Church offers us the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in order to stir up our love. After reminding us, in the Divine Office proper to this feast, of the measureless proofs of Christ’s love, this good Mother asks us anxiously, “Who would not love Him Who has loved us so much? Who among His redeemed would not love Him dearly?” (Roman Breviary). And in order to urge us more and more to repay love with love, she puts on the lips of Jesus the beautiful words of Holy Scripture: “I have loved thee with an everlasting love; therefore have I drawn thee, taking pity on thee”; and again, “Fili, praebe mihi cor tuum,” Son, give Me thy heart (Roman Breviary). This, then, is the substance of true devotion to the Sacred Heart: to return love for love, “to repay love with love,” as St. Margaret Mary, the great disciple of the Sacred Heart, expresses it; “to return love unceasingly to Him who has so loved us,” in the words of St. Teresa Margaret of the Heart of Jesus, the hidden but no less ardent disciple of the divine Heart.

COLLOQUY

“Awake, O my soul. How long will you remain asleep? Beyond the sky there is a King Who wishes to possess you; He loves you immeasurably, with all His Heart. He loves you with so much kindness and faithfulness that He left His kingdom and humbled Himself for you, permitting Himself to be bound like a malefactor in order to find you. He loves you so strongly and tenderly, He is so jealous of you and has given you so many proofs of this, that He willingly gave up His Body to death. He bathed you in His Blood and redeemed you by His death. How long will you wait to love Him in return? Make haste, then, to answer Him.

“Behold, O loving Jesus, I come to You. I come, drawn by Your meekness, Your mercy, Your charity; I come with my whole heart and soul, and all my strength. Who will give me to be entirely conformed to Your Heart, in order that You may find in me everything You desire?

“O Jesus, my King and my God, take me into the sweet shelter of Your divine Heart and there unite me to Yourself in such a way that I shall live totally for You. Permit me to submerge myself henceforth in that vast sea of Your mercy, abandoning myself entirely to Your goodness, plunging into the burning furnace of Your love, and remaining there forever ….

“But what am I, O my God, I, so unlike You, the outcast of all creatures? But You are my supreme confidence because in You can be found the supplement or rather, the abundance of all the favors I have lost. Enclose me, O Lord, in the sanctuary of Your Heart opened by the spear, establish me there, guarded by Your gentle glance, so that I may be confided to Your care forever: under the shadow of Your paternal love I shall find rest in the everlasting remembrance of Your most precious love” (St. Gertrude).

His love,
Matthew

Sacred Heart & Jn 19:34 – June is the month of the Sacred Heart


-by Rev. Dr. Bevil Bramwell, OMI, PhD

“The feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was celebrated this past Friday, but the entire month of June is dedicated to the Sacred Heart. This devotion deserves much wider exposure because it gets to the core of the mystery of our redemption. The overflowing of God’s love through the humanity of Jesus Christ, represented by the sacred heart of Jesus, is a mystery – which by definition means a reality that exceeds our ability to explain – but that shines brightly in our faith.

In his encyclical “On Devotion to the Sacred Heart” (Haurietis aquas), Pope Pius XII pointed to the moment in Jesus’ life where He says: “If any man thirst, let him come to Me, and let him drink he who believes in Me. As the Scripture says: ‘Out of His heart there shall flow rivers of living waters.’ Now this He said of the Spirit which they should receive who believed in Him.” (John 7:37-39) The pope specifically focused on the fact that Jesus describes himself as the source of living water, a symbol of the fountain of life that is the Holy Spirit.

This wondrous phenomenon has renewed importance just now because our current mood resembles the pessimistic and agitated mood in the 1950s during the Cold War when the encyclical was promulgated. The pandemic, the violent protests, and the social polarization are exerting pressure on us all. Yet in the midst of everything – even as many all over the world are dealing with serious illness and death – Christ stands as the infinite source of comfort, love, and peace.

The words that most touched me in the encyclical were Pius XII’s use of a passage from Saint Paul: “Now to Him who is able to accomplish far more than all we ask or imagine, by the power at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” (Ephesians 3:20-21)

In other words, in their devotion to the Sacred Heart, the faithful are not living merely within their own limitations. The prayer to the Sacred Heart calls upon the Spirit of God, which moves us in ways we would not discover solely on our own: “the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.” (Romans 8:26)

So, whatever we are feeling because of what is happening around us, if we can gather ourselves enough to actually form a prayer in our hearts, God does the rest in His providential care. Or as Pius XII put it: “The Sacred Heart of Jesus shares in a most intimate way in the life of the Incarnate Word and has been thus assumed as a kind of instrument of the Divinity.”

This is not just some pious thought or theological abstraction. The pope hearkens back to another specific moment in Jesus’ life: “What is here written of the side of Christ, opened by the wound from the soldier, should also be said of the heart which was certainly reached by the stab of the lance, since the soldier pierced it precisely to make certain that Jesus Christ crucified was really dead.”

What are the effects of the wounding of Jesus’ sacred heart? It fired up the apostles and the martyrs to witness to their faith right to the end. It inspired the doctors of the Church with tireless zeal to teach the faith. It drove the “confessors” to develop virtues both for themselves and as an example to others. It motivated virgins “to a free and joyful withdrawal from the pleasures of the senses and to the complete dedication of themselves to the love of their heavenly Spouse.”

The marvelous focus of our adoration on the Sacred Heart shows it to be the source of divine love but also the example of all of the virtues. He is the living presence of our salvation radiating from the heart of the Church, which after all is His Body. (Romans 12:5)

That was the main point of the encyclical: because the wounded Sacred Heart achieves so much as its divine charity overflows into the world, it should be paid due honor. It is something far beyond anything that we can imagine: “The Heart of Christ is overflowing with love both human and divine and rich with the treasure of all graces which our Redeemer acquired by His life, sufferings, and death, it is, therefore, the enduring source of that charity which His Spirit pours forth on all the members of His Mystical Body.”

As a result, we may be confident that there will be more apostles, martyrs, doctors, confessors, and virgins. This glorious tradition will continue until the end of time. Perhaps some of us may even be inspired to join their ranks.”

Love, O Sacred Heart of Jesus, we place our trust in Thee!! (favorite McCormick family prayer)
Matthew