Tuesday, January 3, 2023
The Tenth Day of Christmas
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
In my Father’s house are many mansions
I saw the Spirit come down like a dove from the sky and remain upon Jesus. The one who sent me to baptize told me, “He is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.”
And the next day John saw Jesus approaching and said:
Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
Jesus baptizes us with the Holy Spirit. And he takes away the sin of the world. This is good theology, but confusing given the experience we have in the sinful world that humanity has lived in ever since John said those words.
Jesuit Alfred Delp was hung for treason by Nazi authorities three months before WW II ended, just as the Christmas season came to a close. He had been in prison for six months, and his writings, ever hopeful and full of faith, were smuggled out.
Space is still filled with the noise of destruction and annihilation, the shouts of self-assurance and arrogance, the weeping of despair and helplessness. But round about the horizon the eternal realities stand silent in their age-old longing. There shines on them already the first mild light of the radiant fulfillment to come. From afar sound the first notes as of pipes and voices, not yet discernible as a song or melody. It is all far off still, and only just announced and foretold. But it is happening, today.
Fr. Delp knew that Jesus had taken away the sins of the world. Like many others, Father Delp withstood the despair that awaited captured and persecuted Jews, Christians, and any other minority that stood in the way of Adolf Hitler. And he held firm because of what he knew about Jesus -the secret in plain sight, the good news, freedom from fear.
The world today needs people who have been shaken by ultimate calamities and emerged from them with the knowledge and awareness that those who look to the Lord will still be preserved by him, even if they are hounded from the earth.
On the tenth day of Christmas, much of the world is cleaning house, readying themselves for yet another year of life on earth. Margaret in fact is at this moment cleaning our refrigerator.
But eight billion people are squeezed onto our planet. Looking at photos on the stunning and beautiful Daily Overview, I realize many, maybe most of us don’t have much of a house to clean. But every one of us has a mansion inside ourselves, given to us by God …
Jesus has taken away the sins of the world. He loves every one of us. And there is no fear in love.
See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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