Thursday, January 9, 2014

Homily: Thursday after Epiphany - Christmas Anointing

During this final week of the Christmas season, we have been reading the First Letter of St. John.  This beautiful letter was written by the Apostle John in his old age to those who had already come to believe in Christ.  It is a clear letter, a child could understand it, yet in it John provides profound insight into what it means to love God and have faith in Christ.

John aimed to make very clear that Jesus was truly divine; for the community of Christians had already begun to be attacked by false doctrines and heresies concerning Jesus.  These false teachings had already started to cause divisions in the Church. So, John the Apostle, writes to give the true teaching about Jesus—that the source of their division—“sin and false teaching” might be healed. 

In today’s passage we hear that true Christian faith consists in believing that Jesus is the Christ begotten by God, and we are to love him by keeping God’s commandments, especially in loving our brother.  John teaches the community here that a heart which clings to sin is often a heart which is resistant to clinging to truth.  He exhorts the community to allow the love of God to conquer sin and division in them—to allow God’s Spirit to unify them in faithfulness and obedience to God.

In the Gospel, we hear that Jesus returned from the desert “in the power of the Spirit”. The Spirit with which he was anointed is the same spirit which anoints the Church—the Spirit which anoints the head anoints the body as well.  Just as Christ was anointed to bring glad tidings to the poor and proclaim liberty to captives, so to have we been anointed: to proclaim to the poor and to the captives that Jesus Christ, God with us, is our liberty, he is our Good News, he is “the victory that conquers the world”, through him sins are forgiven, and the royal road to heaven been made clear. 

To truly live in the “Christmas Spirit” is to allow God’s Spirit to lead us in the ways of making known that Christ is Lord, that he is God-with-us.


May our hearts be free from all that keeps us from witnessing and testifying to the good news of the incarnation for the glory of God and the Salvation of souls.

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