Obeying with Ever-new Wineskins the Author of Salvation, Second Monday (I), January 19, 2015

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Bernadette Parish, Fall River, MA
Monday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass for the Unity of Christians
January 19, 2015
Heb 5:1-10, Ps 110, Mk 2:18-22

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• As we being this Second Week in Ordinary Time, the Church continues to help us, through the Letter to the Hebrews, to grasp how we’re supposed to be living our ordinary Christian life. Last week we pondered Jesus as the definitive Word of the Father in whom the Father has communicated everything. We looked at how Jesus assuming our nature came to lead us, by word and witness, through suffering and death to perfection and the glory of God’s children. We can say in a sense that last week we focused on Jesus as a “prophet,” as the bearer of God’s message, and how we’re supposed to respond to that message. This week the Letter to the Hebrews will help us to focus on Jesus as “priest” and how we are supposed to profit from his priesthood and enter into it.
• Today the Letter to the Hebrews gives us three qualities of the High Priest in the Old Covenant and shows how they all apply to Jesus’ priesthood. It does this by way of introduction because the Letter will go on to distinguished Jesus’ priesthood “of the order of Melchizedek” from the High Priests of the Aaronic Old Testament priesthood. The first quality is “every priest is taken from among men and made their representative before God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.”  The priest is chosen from among men — we’ll describe by whom he is chosen a little later — to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins before God. In the Old Covenant, the sacrifice would be things, from bread offerings, to incense, to lambs, bulls, heifers, pigeons and other animals. Jesus would offer himself as the gift and sacrifice. The second criterion is, “He is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and erring, for he himself is beset by weakness and so, for this reason, must make sin offerings for himself as well as for the people.” The Old Testament priest was one who grasped, he, too, was a sinner and so he understood the need for these sin offerings. For Christ, he is not a sinner, but, as we’ve seen up until now in this Letter, he understands the temptation to sin, having been tempted every way we are without sin. So he recognizes the need for the offering for sin. The third aspect is, “No one takes this honor upon himself but only when called by God, just as Aaron was.” The priest is not chosen by the people from among the people but chosen by God from among the people. The priesthood is a vocation. We see this in Christ when the Letter states, “It was not Christ who glorified himself in becoming high priest, but rather the one who said to him: ‘You are my Son: this day I have begotten you’; just as he says in another place, ‘You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.'” Jesus’ whole life was in response to the calling contained within his sonship, a sonship with no earthly Father just like Melchizedek’s earthly father was not known, as we’ll see later in the week. The sacrifice Jesus would make for his people would be “prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears.” And he is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and erring because “he learned obedience from what he suffered,” he learned through suffering how in a sense to teach others how to obey God through suffering. The Letter concludes this section saying, “When he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” Perfection means fit for the purpose. He was made perfect when as a priest he offered himself satisfactorily as the victim. We learn that he became the “source of eternal salvation” not for everyone but “for all who obey him.” He died for everyone, but it’s only those who obey him who will receive this gift of salvation from salvation’s author.
• The whole point of this section in the Letter to the Hebrews is to communicate that Jesus’ work is to transform us into a sacrifice with him, to make us a gift with him, so that we may echo in our life what he says to us in his, that this is my body, my blood, my sweat, my tears, my life given out of love for others. I use the expression “transform” consciously, because for most of us, we don’t live out our life of faith as a sacrifice for God and others. We don’t wake up looking at the day as an opportunity for another Holocaust. Many of us prefer just to be left alone, to do our own thing, and to the extent that we serve others, we often do so out of “duty” rather than out of “nature.” Christianity is about this transformation. It’s to grasp that in Christ’s priesthood we find our own baptismal priesthood, offering ourselves together with Christ the High Priest as victims, as loving oblations, for God and for others. As St. Paul wrote in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Christ “indeed died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Cor 5:15). St. John penned, “The way we came to know love was that he laid down his life for us; so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers” (1 John 3:16). That’s the metamorphosis Christ wants to bring about in us through his work. This is be the path of eternal salvation if we obey Christ, if we listen to what he’s communicating and put his word into practice, if we hear and follow him.
• To do so, we need to be open to transformation and that’s what the second half of today’s Gospel is about. Jesus gave an allusion to the sacrifice of his High Priesthood when he said, “When the Bridegroom is taken away,” meaning when he is “ripped from” their presence. That’s when they will fast, because the way the Bridegroom is ripped away is through our sins and the sins of others. Jesus is with us always until the end of time, but we are not always with him, and that’s why we fast, to stoke our hunger for him, for entering into communion with him, for living a spousal covenant with Him the Bridegroom in one flesh, by uniting ourselves to his priestly work and making of our whole life a loving sacrifice. We need to fast for this. We need to long for this. We need to recognize that we need this transformation.
• Jesus gives us two homespun images of openness to this divine metamorphosis in us, the patch and the wine and wineskins. “No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak. If he does, its fullness pulls away, the new from the old, and the tear gets worse. Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skins are ruined. Rather, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins.” We know the truth of these images. If we put unshrunken cloth on an old pain of jeans, when the patch shrinks upon washing it will rip even more what it was trying to patch because the path is stronger than the old clothes. We can’t continue wearing our old clothes, in others, when Jesus wants to give us something new. We need the ever new robes of baptism. Second, new wine can’t be poured into old wineskins because the fermentation in the new wine would be too much for the taut old wineskins to handle and both wine and wineskins would be lost. What’s needed are new wineskins to receive Jesus’ new wine. The same old, same old won’t work. We need openness, docility. In response to the aphorism, “You can’t teach old dogs new tricks,” Jesus is saying, “Old canines need always to learn new tricks.” And Jesus wants to train us to offer our lives as an oblation just like he does: that’s the new wine and we need to be able to expand with it.
• We are now in the second day of the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity. We’re conscious of the fact that Jesus, during the Last Supper, prayed ardently that all of us would be one just like He and the Father are one. We’re obviously not one. There are the major divisions between Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants, but even within those major divisions, there are so many others, including within parishes, even within the domestic Church of the family. For the unity for which Jesus prayed to come about, it’s going to require Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants to sacrifice for unity, to allow Jesus to transform them in his priesthood that is the means of reconciliation for the entire human race. During this Octave and beyond, we’re called to sacrifice ourselves in prayer with Jesus, to sacrifice ourselves in forgiveness with Jesus, to sacrifice ourselves in charity with Jesus. And Jesus wants to give us the new wineskins to do it. But we have to obey this will of the Author of Salvation to bring that about.
• Over the course of upcoming days, we’ll ponder Jesus’ High Priesthood more and how we’re supposed to be transformed by it to unite ourselves to it. We know that the great act of his High Priesthood occurred in the continuous prayer of Holy Thursday and Good Friday, in the Sanctuary of the Upper Room, Gethsemane and Calvary. We’re now about to receive that High Priest and Victim, so that entering into communion with Him, we may obey him and “Do this in memory of him,” making our life a holocaust together with him for the Father’s glory, for the unity of all believers, and for the salvation of the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: