Laetare Sunday / 25 & 26 March 2017 / Church
of St John, Agawam & Church of St Martha, Enfield
Rejoice,
O Jerusalem: and come together all you that love her: rejoice with joy, you
that have been in sorrow: that you may exult, and be filled (Is 66:10, 11).
Rejoice?
When our nation is so divided and sick? More acutely, rejoice, when the Church
in our times has been grievously wounded by scandal and decline? Rejoice, when
our culture is flying headlong away from the law of God? Rejoice, when our
young people become daily more disaffected and victimized by this same culture?
When common sense has fallen prey to political correctness, and common
discourse rendered impossible by the dictatorship of relativism? Rejoice? When
the ancient use of the Mass we love so dearly is scarce and beleaguered; when
ecumenism replaces perennial doctrine; when we the clergy are so often weak and
forgetful of our vocations? Rejoice, when we and our loved ones so often feel
the strain and disappointment of life in a fallen world? And on and on the list
may go. And we are to rejoice?
How
tempted we are at times to allow the prophet’s command to ring hollow and
absurd.
On
Ash Wednesday, the beginning of our Lenten fast, Mother Church furnishes us
with the Gospel about true fasting. At the Benedictus antiphon, from that same
Gospel, the priests of the Church prayed: Cum
ieiunatis, nolite fieri sicut hypocritae, tristes. “When you fast, do not
become like the hypocrites, sad.” Or rather, grim, grave, sullen. The hypocrites—and their
counterparts, the Pharisees and scribes—failed to see beyond the exterior of
their religious observance. The Old Law was noble, because it was given by God;
but it was misused, and its inner purpose forgotten. Note well: what was the
result of this failure to understand the Law for what it was? What happened to
the souls of those who fixated only on what was carnal and exterior? They
became grim and sad. Christ, however, commands the opposite. Not accidentally, Isaiah,
at this very hour, issues the same command: Laetare.
Do
you see, dearly beloved, how we are to rejoice?—We must be unlike the hypocrites who see only what is natural; we must
be like Catholics who understand what Divine Providence is about. We have,
undeservedly, received what is supernatural. And what is that first
supernatural truth, the first, fundamental dogma?[1]—The Father loves his Christ.
In
God, the Father eternally begets and loves the Son; and the Son eternally
returns this love to the Father; the Spirit proceeds from them both. The 2nd
Psalm tells us: “The Lord hath said to me: Thou art my son, this day have I
begotten thee. Ask of me, and I will give thee . . . the utmost parts of the
earth for thy possession.”[2] Or again, in the 109th
Psalm: “The Lord said to my Lord: sit thou at my right hand: Until I make thy
enemies thy footstool.”[3] The Father delights in the
Son; this eternal movement of love is the inner life of God—and it is this life of God which we share by
Baptism; we call it sanctifying grace.
These
are the most basic truths of Trinitarian theology—but they are the most sublime
principles on which the Catholic faith rests. The Father loves his Son; in that
Son, we are loved by the Father. Thus the
source of our rejoicing. Isaiah says, “Rejoice, Jerusalem”— Jerusalem, that
biblical type of the holy Church. If we heed Isaiah’s command, then we rejoice,
not in mere appearances, but in unassailable supernatural truths: we rejoice,
then, in the Church that is triumphantly within the nuptial love of Christ
before the Father. In that Church, we are the adopted sons and daughters of the
Father. And while it is true that there is so much to obscure this supernatural
vision—the world, the flesh, the devil—there
is nothing in truth that may obscure the love between the Father and the Son,
and therefore between the Son and his Church. The Father loves his Christ; the
Church is the home of our adoption in the
Son. Therefore we rejoice; it is the beginning and end of our joy.
Bl
Columba Marmion (1858-1932) wrote the following; his words tell of all the love
and triumph of God and could only have been spoken by Catholic theology:
Christ, in order
to give the Divine adoption back to us, has had to triumph over the obstacles
created by sin; but these obstacles have only served to make the Divine marvels
in the work of our super-natural restoration shine forth more to the eyes of
the whole world: . . . . all the elect are so many trophies won by that Divine
blood, and that is why they are like a glorious praise to Christ and to His
Father: ‘unto the praise’ of His glory.[4]
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