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| Visitation by Mariotto Albertinelli, 1503, Public domain |
December 16, 2019
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas
Psalm 123
Psalm 124
Ephesians 1:3-10
Philippians 3:20-21
Luke 1:46-55
We are blessed to be able to come together this evening to pray and to thank God for the gift of His Son, who in turn gave us the gift of His Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our Blessed Mother is so central to what we celebrate during Advent, this liturgical season of hope. Every time we pray vespers, we pray the Magnificat, the song of praise sung by our Lady at the visitation with her cousin Elizabeth. Her song is a song of hope and it reveals her to be filled with God’s grace, her complete dependence and communion with God in her response to His call at the annunciation speaks also to our own reliance on His grace in our own vocations.
Like so many other graces from God, we can take for granted the message of the Magnificat that we pray every day. We are here at the end of the first semester of your respective schools. We have arrived also at the end of the calendar year. We have worked very hard to arrive here and our zeal can soon become impatience because we can forget that we rely on God’s power for everything and that we are only instruments in His hand. We can forget that we are powerless over so many aspects of our own formation and we require His grace to form us as human beings, as Christians, and for some of us, as priests. While it is true that each of us are agents of our own ongoing formation, this agency is always in response to God’s grace, a response born of the fear of the Lord and never forged out of a sense of self-sufficiency.
The Blessed Virgin Mary sings of the fear of the Lord in her Magnificat, “He has mercy on those who fear Him in every generation.” As Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “Perhaps this is a phrase with which we are not very familiar or perhaps we do not like it very much. But ‘fear of the Lord’ is not anguish; it is something quite different. It is the concern not to destroy the love on which our life is based. Fear of the Lord is that sense of responsibility that we are bound to possess for the portion of the world that has been entrusted to us in our lives.” It is the sense that we are accountable to God and we do not want to fail Him because He loves us.
Fear of the Lord always brings authentic hope. The virtue of hope is entirely necessary for our salvation. We receive it at Baptism and again at Confirmation. Hope is the bridge between faith and charity. We can lose sight of the virtue of hope in our culture influenced by evangelical Christianity on the one hand and secularism on the other hand. These influences prompt us to emphasize a sense of assurance in place of hope. Luther thought that faith alone is all that is necessary to offer us the assurance of our salvation. This approach frequently leads us into sins of presumption or despair. In response to this, the Council of Trent clearly taught that faith without hope cannot offer us a share in God’s life.
What is there about God that prompts us to hope? The scholastic theologians wrote a lot about this question because it is a question that very much concerns what makes the Good News so good. They came up with different answers. Saint Bonaventure thought that it is God’s faithfulness that prompted us to hope in God. Others thought that it is God’s mercy. Yet, Saint Thomas Aquinas, with a greater deal of clarity in thought, identified the motive for our hope as being God’s omnipotence. “Nothing is impossible for God,” especially when we accept our powerlessness. “He has shown the strength of His arm and has scattered the proud in their conceit; He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich He has sent away empty; He has come to the help of His servant Israel for He has remembered His promise of mercy, the promise He made to our fathers, to Abraham, and his children forever.”
Hope in God is the calm for all our fears. Hope in God is the answer to our futility and limitations. Hope is the door that God opens to the prison of our powerlessness and lack of control. As Saint Thérèse of Lisieux wrote with hope, “everything is a grace.” Hope is better than assurance because it brings us closer into that right relationship with God who is love. To rely falsely on a sense of assurance can lead us to see the intimate relationship that God offers us simply as a matter of convenience or usefulness. The God in whom we believe offers us love through the virtue of hope. We cannot love without hope. “All generations will call me blessed.” This means that the future brought about instrumentally by Mary’s “yes,” what is to come, belongs to God, it is in God's hands, that it is God who conquers our enemies and brings us home to Him.