Monday January 17, 2005 Homily by Fr. Robert Altier Second Week in Ordinary Time
Reading (Hebrews 5:1-10) Gospel (St. Mark 2:18-22)
In the first
reading today, Saint Paul speaks to us about the high priesthood of Jesus. He
tells us, Every high priest is taken from
among men and made their representative before God, and the purpose
is to offer gifts and sacrifices that are
going to be acceptable to the Lord. He tells us also that, because
the high priest himself is a sinner, he is able to deal patiently with other
people who are sinners because he himself is
beset by weakness. But then he speaks of Our Lord and says, He learned obedience through what He suffered; and
when He was made perfect, He became the source of eternal life for all who obey
Him.
Now we have to ask
ourselves, “What exactly does this mean?” Jesus is the Son of God. He never
sinned. He is perfect – and He always was – so how can He be made perfect? Saint Paul, in his Letter to
the Philippians, tells us that Jesus was obedient even unto death. So how can
He learn obedience if He was perfectly obedient?
The matter that we
have to consider here has to do with our humanity. As the high priest, He is
allowed to enter into the Holy of Holies, which the high priest did once a
year. Jesus, as we will hear later on in this same Letter to the Hebrews,
entered into the Holy of Holies that is not made by hands (the copy of the
original one); He entered into heaven. When He entered into heaven, He took
with Him His humanity and He offered to the heavenly Father all of the wounds
that He had incurred on our behalf. Now we know that when He went to the Cross,
which was His sacrifice, it was the sacrifice of His own body. Every high
priest has to have a sacrifice to offer. In the Old Testament, it was the blood
of bulls and goats. The high priest had to offer a bull for his own sins, the
reason being that as the high priest Aaron had offered the golden calf in the
desert and so God basically said, “If you are going to worship this stupid
thing, then sacrifice it to Me.” So the high priest had to offer a bull
(because that is what the high priest had worshiped out in the desert) and for
the people he had to offer the blood of a goat. He had to take that blood with
Him back into the Holy of Holies and sprinkle it upon the mercy seat. But Jesus
offered His humanity. It was not animal blood and animal flesh; it was human
blood and human flesh that He offered. The blood of the bulls and goats could
not take away sins; it merely covered them up. Because Jesus offered human
blood and human flesh, it was able to remove sin because it was human beings
who had sinned.
In this sacrifice
of His own humanity (His whole Person, of course, but being able to do so
because He had a human nature) He went to the Cross with all of our sins, with
all of our imperfections. There was no sin or imperfection in Him, but He took
us and all of our sins and all of our imperfections with Him. Just as we can
look at the baptism of Our Lord and say that He was baptized so that we could
be baptized and we were baptized in Him in His baptism, and just as we can say
that when He was crucified it was our sins that were crucified and nailed to
the Cross, so now we recognize that it is our disobedience and our imperfection
that is being remedied through His obedience and through His perfect act of
worship and honor to His heavenly Father. And so He is made perfect, meaning
not the very Person of Christ (because there was no imperfection in Him) but
the Mystical Person of Christ. We are made perfect in Him, just as we are baptized
in Him, just as our sins are crucified in Him. Now, our sins being forgiven, we
are made perfect, we are made obedient.
Obviously, in the
manner in which we sit here today, I think we can all look very quickly at
ourselves and realize we are far from perfect and far from obedient. So how is
it that we can be perfect and obedient in Christ? Number one, it is the
Mystical Body as a whole. The Church is perfect. The Church is perfectly
obedient. The Church is the fullness of Christ. And so we do have that
perfection already on earth. Then, for each and every one of us as individual
members of the Mystical Body, the grace is there to be able to be perfect and
to be able to be obedient to God. As I mentioned to you many times, this is not
impossible. The saints have done it and it is fully possible for each and every
one of us; not easy, but possible that we an actually make it to the point in
the spiritual life where we will be perfectly obedient to the Will of God. And
when we are perfectly obedient to the Will of God and our will is one with His,
there will be no more sin in our lives. We will have removed all sin and all
imperfection, spiritually speaking, from within us.
So that is what is
possible for us, and that is what it means that Christ was made perfect. His
Mystical Body was made perfect in this sacrifice. His priesthood was made
perfect. The obedience of the Church was made perfect in what it is that He
did. For us, then, we cannot sit back and say, “I can’t do it.” By ourselves,
no we cannot; but in Christ we can because it has already been done for us. It
is now merely for us to enter into what He has already done, to unite ourselves
with Him. If we are willing to be sacrificed with Him, if we are willing to
exercise our baptismal priesthood, we too can be made obedient, we too can be
made perfect; and therefore the redemption of Christ and the salvation He won
for us will also, within us, be made perfect.
* This text was
transcribed from the audio recording of a homily by Father Robert Altier with minimal editing.