January 29, 2025 at 10:14 a.m.
Feast of the Presentation of the Lord
Darkness and light, sorrow and joy, hope and despair, these are the obvious contrasts that dominate the readings which we proclaim on this Feast of the Presentation of the Lord Jesus Christ. Being the pessimist, I would like to focus for a bit on what Simeon tells Our Blessed Mother in Sunday’s Gospel:
“Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted — and you yourself a sword will pierce — so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
On a unique church on the Caelian Hill, which is based in part on the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and dedicated to Saint Stephen, the proto-martyr, there are images of the martyrs. These images did not come into that basilica until Pope Gregory XIII entrusted this church to the Jesuits who commissioned the artist Pomarancio to paint them.
I urge you one day to examine these paintings. They are brutal, they are grotesque and they are disturbing, but, then again, so can life be, especially life in the contemporary world. They are meant to inspire courage in the hearts of Christians, to those who are able to perceive beyond the values set by this world, to those with an openness to the supernatural in our all too natural, fallen world.
And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and
the grace of God was on him.
— Luke 2:40
These images are also meant to shock us, to wake us up from our this-worldly “dogmatic slumber” to the reality of what the world is for Christians, those who are in the world and yet not of the world. As Flannery O’Connor states: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” And the world does not hold the same beliefs as you and I do.
The martyrs make the faith credible. They are the ultimate expression of the credibility of Divine Revelation. When ISIS savagely murdered 20 Egyptians and one Ghanaian man in January 2015, and then later had the audacity to release the video on Feb. 15, 2015, stating that “Rome is next,” their plan backfired. Instead of provoking fear into the hearts of the Christian world, for those that believe, these 20 Coptic Christians and one Muslim, Matthew Ayariga, baptized by blood, was convinced of the truth of the Christian faith due to the witness of his fellow workers. “Their God is my God. I will go with them,” he uttered even when he could have been pardoned by his executioners.
The word martyr is taken from procedural law. In the trial against the devil, Jesus Christ is the first and actual witness for God, the first martyr, who has since been followed by countless others.
Today’s Church is more than ever a “Church of the Martyrs” and thus a witness to the living God. If we look around and listen with an attentive heart, we can find witnesses everywhere, especially among ordinary people, but also in the high ranks of the Church, who stand up for God with their life and suffering. It is an inertia of the heart that leads us to not wish to recognize them. One of the great and essential tasks of our evangelization is, as far as we can, to establish habitats of faith and, above all, to find and recognize them.
If we are to be Christian in the world today, really Christian, we will suffer daily martyrdoms. The Lord Jesus, the King of Martyrs, suffered, and so will we. He suffers both in His blessed Passion, but in the pre-Passion misunderstandings and calumny which we proclaim in Sunday’s Gospel. Perhaps these will not be physical, but more subtle, like having someone pull their child closer to them when they see a Roman collar, or a coworker dismiss your opinion and think you bigoted because of your faith. If we stand true, in every aspect of our faith, we will suffer.
The rocks are in hand; get ready to be pummeled. A sword like that of Our Lady of Sorrows will pierce our hearts. But, in the long view, it doesn’t matter: Truth is truth and veritas in caritas (truth in charity) is what matters. The ultimate credibility of the faith is martyrdom. Have faith that the Lord will support us, even in these little martyrdoms.
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