Word to the Wise
Wednesday, January 2, 2008 - Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, bishops and doctors of the Church
[1 John 2:22-28 and John 1:19-28]Let what you heard from the beginning remain in you. If what you heard from the beginning remains in you, then you will remain in the Son and in the Father.
The celebration of the feast of two great Fathers of the Church and the words which I quoted from the first scripture for today have reminded me of some other words which Pope John Paul II wrote in a letter of blessing to the General Chapter of the Dominican Friars which met in Providence, RI, in 2001: "We live in a time marked in its own way by a denial of the Incarnation. For the first time since Christ's birth two thousand years ago, it is as if he no longer had a place in an ever more secularized world. Not that he is always denied explicitly: indeed many claim to admire Jesus and to value elements of his teaching. Yet he remains distant: he is not truly known, loved and obeyed, but consigned to a distant past or a distant heaven." Sts. Basil and Gregory spent much of their ministry involved in a controversy about Jesus' humanity, which the Arians denied could be true since flesh was material and evil and God could not have anything to do with that. Indeed, a version of that ancient heresy was at the root of the foundation of the Dominican Order - the Albigensian heresy - which led St. Dominic to create an order with the explicit mission to preach the truth about Jesus Christ. What Pope John Paul II points out is a different tendency - one which more or less denies Jesus' divinity and places him in a kind of pantheon with many other religious and holy people of the past who said things that might or might not be helpful in our present secular world! Pope Benedict XVI has explicitly spoken out about this kind of "relativism" which denies God's decisive intervention in human history in the form of Jesus Christ, born of Mary, crucified, died, buried and risen from the dead. Jesus is not just some important religious personage of the past such as Mohammed or Buddha! He is Lord of all time and is alive today in the Church. He is not a figure of a "distant past" or a "distant heaven." AMEN
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