Amazing Grace of the Savior Lord Jesus Christ
Amazing Grace of the Savior Lord Jesus Christ
Our Lord came in humility, but He will return in glory; the object of His first coming being to prepare for the second. Those who receive Him gladly in time will be welcomed by him when eternity begins; while those who refused to acknowledge Him will be rejected.
For this reason the prophets do not make any clear distinction between the two comings of the Messias, since they are but two acts of the same divine drama. In the same way our Lord does not separate the destruction of Jerusalem from the end of the world, since the chastisement which fell upon the Jews in a symbol of the eternal punishment which will reach all those who have rejected our divine Redeemer. The first coming has taken place, the second is yet to come. Let us prepare for it. That is the tenor of today’s Gospel.
With this account of the Last Judgment, closes the Temporal Cycle of the liturgical year which began on the first Sunday of Advent and ends today. Ever since Advent, the Church has been concerned with the preparation for these two comings of mercy and justice, for she never separates them. Never is this subject absent from her thoughts, least of all on this last Sunday; for if Christ came once at His first coming to save us, it was that we might enter heaven in His glorious train when he comes once more at the end of time. This will be the true Pasch, the full passing into the real land of promise, of which this concluding Sunday is the figure and the type.
Source: Dom Gaspar Lefebvre, OSB, 1945, adapted and abridged.
(St. Paul wrote to the Galatians to stop the subversion of the Gospel.)
The first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, which according to the traditional Roman Rite, is read as part of Matins on the third Sunday after Epiphany. In the Byzantine Rite, however, verses 11 thru 19 make up the Epistle reading for the Sunday following the Feast of the Nativity (Christmas). Here is an excerpt:
"For I give you to understand, brethren, that the Gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For neither did I receive it of man, nor did I learn it; but by the revelation of Jesus Christ."
It may be startling to some in these times to recall that even in the earliest decades following the birth, death, and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ the Gospel, which had been entrusted to the Church, was already being subverted. This is why St. Paul, in his charity, wrote to the churches of Galatia to remind them that the Gospel he preached is not the work of human hands, not even the work of an Apostle’s hands, but comes directly from Christ.
And what was subverting the Gospel of Jesus Christ within the churches of Galatia? Was it some great perversion, such as fidelity to the grotesque excesses of pagan religion or the embrace of a novel philosophy that called the possibility of truth into doubt? It was nothing of the sort. For those early Christians of Galatia, what subverted the Gospel was faithfulness to the Mosaic Law. That is to say, the Galatians’ faith was not being corrupted by an obvious evil; it was being undermined by a misplaced prioritization of a gift from God, which had been fulfilled in Christ.
After the revelation of Jesus Christ and entry into His Church through Baptism, St. Paul goes on to explain, “There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). In other words, in the interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas, it is as if St. Paul were saying: “Truly have I said, that as many of you as have been baptized in Christ Jesus have put on Christ, because there is nothing in man that would exclude anyone from the sacrament of the faith of Christ and of baptism” (Super Epistolam B. Pauli ad Galatas lectura, Chapter 3). And, according to St. Thomas, the Apostle “mentions three differences among men to show that no one is excluded from faith in Christ by any of them[.]”
Although the subversion of the Gospel which infected the churches of Galatia may seem far removed from the myriad of subversions found throughout the Catholic Church today, some share a common ancestry with the Galatian controversy.
When the Gospel is subverted today, that subversion often comes from goods, albeit of a secondary nature. Economic prosperity, environmental stability, the cessation of warfare, and peaceful coexistence are not evils in and of themselves, which is why it is so tempting for Catholics, including the Church’s leadership, to incorporate these secondary goods into their interpretation and dissemination of the Gospel. But what does this distortion accomplish except to reduce the Gospel down to the level of a social theory or political platform?
It is exponentially harder to subvert the Gospel immediately with those things that are overtly opposed to the Gospel: abortion, gender theory, religious indifferentism, warmongering, and so forth. Yet when the Church’s bishops, including Pope Francis, preach a Gospel subverted by worldly concerns and political goals, these obvious evils have a way of creeping in, of further distorting the true meaning of faith and salvation, and ultimately splintering the Church.
St. Paul knew 2,000 years ago how easily Christians could be tempted into subverting the Gospel. In order that the Church not find itself splintered, he implored the Galatians to remember that the Gospel comes down to man from God above; it is not an artifice of man below. That central teaching should be echoed by all of the Church’s clergy today, but lamentably it is not.
Were the Gospel preached in the manner in which St. Paul preached it, that is, in the form in which Christ revealed it, perhaps the peoples of the world would understand that what they need above all else is God. May the day come quickly when those entrusted with the Church’s care preach this message to all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Source: fsspx.news
Jesus has delivered us not from Egypt, Babylon, or Rome, but from sin, death, and the devil. And in the movement throughout the Bible, God’s final destination for his people was never merely an earthly plot of land. Rather, the movement from the Exodus to Wilderness Wandering and ultimately to the Promised Land was always a sign of something greater, pointing to the ultimate Promised Land—heaven itself. In fact, in the New Covenant, we already participate in this heavenly reality right now, as is manifest here in the Letter to the Hebrews:
You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven and to a judge who is God of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel.”
Hebrews 12:22-24
Did you catch that? The New Covenant family of faith is the heavenly Jerusalem, and it includes angels! Not only angels, but also “spirits of just men made perfect.”
(By Professor Andrew Swafford)