Thursday after Epiphany
This Christmas we have been contemplating the Incarnation: the Word-become-Flesh, the fulfillment of Scripture right before our eyes. Today, as an adult, Jesus proclaims that the Scripture He reads is fulfilled in the hearing of those present.
And they “…were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Are we, His disciples, equally amazed? For we hear the very same words as He reads today, and even a testimony as to the reactions of the people; why do we not have the same reaction? Perhaps because, unlike the people of Nazareth—people suffering under foreign occupation, people who have never had a Christmas—we have lost a sense of anticipation and vigil? In other words: we often do not listen to the Word of God with a sense of waiting for it to be fulfilled. Christmas is a memorial of something that happened long ago and yet, whenever we attend the Mass, we do not merely celebrate not a past thing but participate in a present thing:
“[Christ], our Lord and God, was once and for all to offer himself to God the Father by his death on the altar of the cross, to accomplish there an everlasting redemption. But because his priesthood was not to end with his death, at the Last Supper "on the night when he was betrayed," [he wanted] to leave to his beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice (as the nature of man demands) by which the bloody sacrifice which he was to accomplish once for all on the cross would be re-presented, its memory perpetuated until the end of the world, and its salutary power be applied to the forgiveness of the sins we daily commit.” (Catechism #1366)
What if we approached every Mass not only as a memorial of what Jesus has done, but open to what Jesus may yet do? What if we listened to the Word of God not considering how it has been fulfilled, but continuing to listen, with faith, to how it promises things that God is still doing and has yet to accomplish? Perhaps then we can experience some of the amazement of those in the synagogue that day at how the local boy, the carpenter’s son—Our Savior, Jesus—read and preached. Perhaps then Christmas could be as magical for the future we long for as it is about the past for which we are grateful.