Homily
Given by Fr. David Bock Feast of the Epiphany
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Readings : Isaiah 60:1-6 Ephesians 3:2-3A,5-6 Matthew 2:1- 12
At this time of year, we have been experiencing a deluge of transitions. Over a million people gathered in Times Square to celebrate a transition into the New Year of 2007. The president is making new appointments; there is a whole new Congress with new speakers and leaders.
Some of these transitions are superficial and not really too significant. How many past Majority Leaders and Speakers of the House do you remember? But others cut deeply into our lives and bring change into our personal history. A marriage, a birth, a death, a religious profession, a divorce, a change in employment, an abbatial election: These are significant events that happen in our lives. They bring us to a threshold and, once we cross it, life will never be the same again. Their impact can be so deep that we sense them to be traumatic. They wound. They pierce to the marrow of our being. “Trauma” has the same root as the word “throes.” Someone is in the throes of pain or joy. One's whole being is consumed by an experience of yearning which comes from a wound in the depths, in the heart. These transitions reveal what is usually latent and silent in ourselves. We didn't realize what was within us until they occurred. We discover our potential and our limits through them.
We are now closing the Christmas season by celebrating the feast of the Epiphany and the Baptism of Our Lord. We have been celebrating the event of the Great Transition. The Word, hidden in the bosom of the Father, crossed infinite boundaries and thresholds to become manifest in our flesh and in our history. Because of that event, the world can never be the same. (Nor, really, can God be the same since He has made this transition from the heart of the Godhead.) When we speak of the “ transitus ” of Christ, we usually mean his life, suffering, death, and exaltation into glory. But this transitus presupposes the first Transition of the Word into the world. The Word has come as something absolutely new, a total gift to the world. He humbled himself to share our humanity so that we might share his divinity – as the priest says at each Eucharist when he mixes water with the wine.
Our call is now the call to share in that common humanity we have in Christ. It calls us to relinquish those illusions our ego is so skillful in weaving, and pass through those inner thresholds to a point of self-emptying where we know ourselves to be one with the whole human race. It is through our commonness, rather than through our individual uniqueness, that we and Christ are linked. In his Prologue to the Rule , Benedict reminds us that we “share by patience in the suffering of Christ so as to share in his Kingdom.” What does this sharing mean? Is it like sharing a room with a roommate? Is it like sharing a computer –“You can use it when I'm finished”? Is it a 50/50 deal? Or a 90% to 10% arrangement? Isn't it rather letting all the barriers of our identity dissolve in the face of the desire of another? It is that self-emptying which has ceased to be concerning about recognition, validation, or compensation. What happens in that sharing when God says to us, “You are with me always and all that I have is yours”? Perhaps we can afford to forget ourselves.
It is the very nature of celebration to share; and it is the very nature of sharing to celebrate. God celebrates our humanity. That is Christmas. We enter into a shared time, a shared space, and a shared world. It is a time of excess. God has “gone out” of his hiddenness and mystery and come into our world. We go out from our little worlds of calculation, caution, and self-regard. It is the excess of abundance. Our God is a God of excess and abundance. “Then you shall be radiant at what you see, your heart shall throb and overflow.” We know that excess especially when the wounds, the throes of our hearts are exposed. When what is hidden is laid bare. Several times during the initiation of a monk into community life, he lies prostrate on the floor and is asked, “What do you seek?” The formula given as an answer is: “The mercy of God and of the Order.” We never initially realize the fullness that those words will take in our lives, how they will be fleshed out. “Mercy upon mercy upon mercy.” There is no proportion between who we are, what we have done, what we can do, and what God does for us and through us and what we mean in His eyes. We experience this incongruence and lack of proportion as mystery, as the silence and absence of God; and maybe even as absurdity and abandonment. But these too are manifestations of God's excess.
This is the grace and mercy of which you have been called to be steward. Paul gives us today a succinct description of your role as abbot: “The stewardship of God's grace, given to me for your benefit.” It is a stewardship given to you which creates a new quality in your relations with your brothers. Nothing will be the same anymore. It is experienced as a stewardship, as a ministry, as a service to the benefit of the community and all who are “coheirs, members of the same body, co-partners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.” A living, prayerful acknowledgment of the excess of God's grace and gift is the only dependable source of the excess of generosity to which you are called. It may seem at times “all together too much.” Benedict foresees this in his Chapter 68 “If a Brother Is Asked an Impossible Task.” He must “trusting in God's help, in love, obey.” That seems to be the bottom line. Some superiors have been described as “successful” because of long tenures, fund-raising abilities, new foundations, etc. But I personally think the criterion of this discernment should be: is he obedient to the Word of God. It is a harder task to create a space in the community in which the Word of God can be heard and responded to in love.
The story we have heard in today's Gospel reminds us that the reception that the Word receives is often one of hostility, potential jeopardy, and (worse) just indifference. “When King Herod heard this, he was greatly troubled and all Jerusalem with him.” The scribes and priests had accurate information: they had the texts, the traditions, their experience, their certitude. But they never moved, the never went out of Jerusalem , never crossed a threshold. Here is knowledge without movement, without desire, without passion. Sometimes, you can know too much. It is paralyzing without courage. Herod was resourceful in engaging others in his plots. He was a man of action, intoxicated with power. But power without love, without understanding, without compassion follows its own logic to violence.
Only the magi continued their journey which had led them to abandon their securities, their certainties, their status. They became pilgrims, aliens, and foreigners. Strangers to the world's ways. “It is love that impels them to pursue everlasting life” Chapter 5, RB ). But because of this, they were able to be led by the light to the source of light, the child and Mary his mother. They offered him the homage of their lives in emptying themselves out before him. Their own inner truth was revealed in acknowledging and welcoming the Word which had the power to make them children of God. “And they departed for their country by another way.” But nothing was ever the same anymore.
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