A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

​+ The Sacred Liturgy is essentially contemplative. It recapitulates the mysteries of God and of His definitive and salvific revelation in human history year after year in order that we might be drawn into and caught up by those very mysteries and come, ever more gradually, to live in and from them. This is certainly the ‘bread and butter’ of the monastic vocation: we are nothing other than men called to celebrate and live these mysteries as the very ground of our being in the Sacred Liturgy as it has grown and developed under the tutelage of God the Holy Spirit over the ages and has been handed on to us in the Church’s Tradition.
 
Of course, this active contemplation of God’s wonders in the school of the Sacred Liturgy is not the preserve of monks alone. Whilst it is our privileged and God given vocation to ‘put nothing before the Work of God’ (Rule, ch. 43), the mysteries of God celebrated and made present amongst us by God in and through the Sacred Liturgy are for all the baptised, and we are all called, mutatis mutandis according to the duties of our particular vocation, to live ever more deeply in and from the realities present in our sacred rites.
 
This is the kernel of what came to be known of “the liturgical movement” of the last century. Both St Pius X and the Second Vatican Council taught this clearly: the Sacred Liturgy is the “the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit.” (Tra le Sollecitudine, 1903; Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 14). If we are to be true Christians we must be in a liturgical relationship with God—a relationship which is an active contemplation of what He has done for us in Christ and what He continues to do for us through the rites of the One True Church He founded.
 
And it is in the context of these Sacred Rites that the Church reads Sacred Scripture. The Liturgy is the Bible’s natural habitat as it were. But in fact, we do not read the Bible at Mass and in the other liturgical rites; rather, the Word of God lives and breathes throughout their entirety, in the prayers, psalms, responsories, longer and shorter readings and other texts. The Word of God lives and breathes and embraces us and teaches and cajoles us, and even chastises us at times, as we penetrate more deeply into its mystery—the mystery of the Word become flesh Who dwelt amongst us, which soon we are to celebrate with apposite solemnity and joy.
 
The more this liturgical contemplation becomes our staple spiritual diet, the more we receive from Almighty God, the more clearly we hear His voice. To this end the Divine Office frequently recapitulates the content of the Epistle and Gospel of the Holy Mass of a given day or feast, having us sing of these throughout twenty-four hours on Sundays and first-class feasts.
 
This fourth Sunday of Advent the Chapter (or short lesson/reading) at First Vespers, Lauds, Terce and Second Vespers comes from this morning’s Epistle, in which St Paul defends himself to the turbulent Corinthian Church and Providentially teaches us about the nature of the ministry of apostles in the Church. “One should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God,” he insists, adding further that “it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.”
 
The Church has pondered his teaching ever since, understanding the “mysteries of God” to be the sacred mysteries celebrated in the liturgy—the sacraments. So too, she has ruminated on the meaning of stewardship and has found it to be clearly distinct from any kind of proprietorial behaviour in respect of the “mysteries of God.” The vocation of the apostles and of their successors today is the be trustworthy dispensers of what has been handed on to them from the apostles by their predecessors in the Church’s Tradition, not parsimonious scrooges nor vain ideologues.
 
Indeed, and above all, the successor of Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, is called to exemplify this Pauline teaching, as the emeritus Bishop of Rome taught:
 
“The power that Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors is, in an absolute sense, a mandate to serve. The power of teaching in the Church involves a commitment to the service of obedience to the faith. The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the contrary: the Pope's ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God's Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.” (Homily, 7 May 2005)
 
In contemplating Saint Paul’s teaching on this fourth Sunday of Advent, one cannot but recall the teaching of the Letter to the Hebrews: “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (4:12)
 
Indeed, the Word of God in the inspired words of Saint Paul in this morning’s epistle cuts through much of that which we experience at the hands of some apostles today, revealing much and giving us more still to ponder in its light. And it is in this light—in the light of the Word of God living and acting in the Church’s Sacred Liturgy—that we must persevere in the faith, if necessary, even in spite of the lack of trustworthiness that may be found in the stewards of the mysteries of the Faith. It is in this light that we must ourselves be faithful, even if the requisite fidelity seems lacking in the stewards.
 
Saint Benedict teaches his abbots repeatedly that they are but stewards of the monastery and of their monks, and that the abbot must answer for each one at the final judgment—a teaching that is all the more applicable to successors of the apostles, to whom more has been entrusted. (cf. Lk 12:48)
 
Our contemplation of these realities must needs become prayer—today, a fervent and urgent prayer that those to whom the apostolic office has been entrusted in the Church of our day shall indeed be faithful stewards of the mysteries. In the first place we must pray for our own bishop and father, and with him for the Holy Father, who is called to be “the visible principle and foundation of unity of both the bishops and of the faithful” within the universal Church (Lumen Gentium, 23).
 
So too we must pray for the whole College of Bishops, many of whom we are privileged to call friends, that they shall without exception constantly bind themselves and their particular Churches “to obedience to God's Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism,” that the Word of God, who became flesh for our salvation may ever live and act in the sacred rites of His Church, that we may enter into them ever more deeply, for our salvation and for the salvation of the world. +