Christ offers himself for our embrace – Luke 2:22-40

 Holy Family, Year B; St. Adalbert's and St. Casimir's.

Video (Homily starts at 17:40).

Ordinarily, the times that bring families together are often the happiest times and the saddest times. We gather for weddings, baptisms, graduations, holidays. We gather for funerals, or for crises. More and more these days, of course, we “gather” remotely. What brings us together in these times, what leads us to tolerate imperfect technology, is the conviction that at the most important times in one another’s lives, it’s important for family to support one another and show that support in some real, tangible way. That’s true of the Church as one big family, that’s true of each of our families, that’s true also of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the religious family to which I and Fathers Ryan and Zach belong. And one way we learn to do that is from the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. 

They go together, as a pious Jewish family, for this rite of the presentation of Jesus, and there, they meet Simeon, who recognizes Jesus for who he is. He takes him in his arms and sings out, “Lord, I’m ready to die now, because I’ve held the Messiah in my arms!” He recognizes that Jesus is the light of the world. Most importantly, he recognizes that, while he is truly the glory of his people Israel, he is light not to them alone, but to the whole world. Luke’s gospel doesn’t feature about the magi, Gentiles coming to worship Jesus; that’s just in Matthew. What Matthew shows in that story, Luke tells in this prophetic song that Simeon sings, that was doubtless amplified in the thanksgiving that Anna the prophet offered right afterwards, which unfortunately we don’t get a text for.

 

Friends, we hold the Messiah too. All of us at Mass receive Jesus, the Word of God, when we hear the scripture, the word about the Word, proclaimed and broken open. In a special way, if we’re receiving communion today, we hold Christ with our bodies. Receiving our Lord in our hands provides us with a wonderful closeness to Simeon who took Jesus in his arms and was moved to joy-filled prophetic speech. The church father St. Cyril, when he was bishop of Jerusalem, spoke to his church about receiving communion, and he spoke of how they made of their hands a throne to hold, but briefly, their God. For in that moment, we receive Christ, body, blood, soul, and divinity, and we embrace and consume, being led to something even more intimate than Simeon knew. But it is still a foretaste. Our embrace of Christ is but a foretaste of that day we all hope for, when Christ will embrace us and welcome us into the halls of heaven, to stand shoulder to shoulder with the saints in the place he has prepared for us. We can pray, in our preparation for each communion, and in our thanksgiving after each communion, that this communion would prepare us for the next, conscious that the next might be that heavenly reception where Christ will receive us in embrace.

 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The road to resurrection leads through the cross, the cross on which Jesus, priest and victim, offered the perfect sacrifice, re-presented to us here today in this Mass, and the cross he bids us, his disciples, take up as we come and follow him. I’m sure Simeon didn’t know the details of how Jesus would offer his life for the life of the world. But he knew that dynamic. He told Mary that a sword would pierce her heart too. The holy family went together to the presentation, thinking it was one of those happy times when families do things together. And there is a lot that’s happy here. That’s why this is one of the five joyful mysteries. But it’s also one of the seven sorrows of Mary, because hearing this prophecy must have been scary. Jesus was still a baby at this point, so thank goodness Mary and Joseph still had each other to lean on as they heard this scary news.

 

St. Bernard of Clairvaux describes Mary as “more than a martyr,” because she consented to know much sorrow. She loved Jesus so much that his pain became her pain and she endured and did not abandon. She stayed at the foot of the cross and joined her grief with Jesus’ pain. She stands with us when we suffer, and she bids us stand with others on their crosses.

 

Blessed Basil Moreau, the founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross, entrusted his religious to the patronage of Our Lady under the title, Our Lady of Sorrows, that is Our Lady who let her heart be pierced by loving a Son who sacrificed himself for us. I’d like to close with a few words from our Constitutions that speak of the role she plays:

 

There stood by the cross of Jesus his mother Mary, who knew grief and was a Lady of Sorrows…. To her many sons and daughters, whose devotions ought to bring them often to her side, she tells much of this daily cross and its daily hope.

 

If we drink the cup each of us is poured and given, we servants will fare no better than our master. But if we shirk the cross, gone too will be our hope. It is in fidelity to what we once pledged that we will find the dying and the rising equally assured. … It is the Lord Jesus calling us. “Come. Follow me.”