HE MUST INCREASE AND WE MUST DECREASE

SATURDAY AFTER EPIPHANY SUNDAY

1 Jn 5:14-21; Ps 149:1-6,9; Jn 3:22-30

The Son of Man must Increase in Us

The new self we conceive through faith in the mystery of the Incarnation is in the likeness of the Son of Man. Since the new self lives in communion with the Holy Spirit, our spiritual life develops by the will of the Father. Because prayer is a spiritual activity in union with the Holy Spirit, it extends the prayer of the Son of Man, our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus, Saint Paul says in his letter to the Romans that prayer is our acknowledgment of God as our Father in union with the Holy Spirit. Saint John talks about our confidence in prayer given this understanding. “We are quite confident that if we ask the Son of God for anything, and it is in accordance with his will, he will hear us; and, knowing that whatever we may ask, he hears us, we know that we have already been granted what we asked of him.” This confidence in prayer is always commensurate with the purity of our conversion to God. The deeper our conversion to God, the more confident we are in prayer.

Based on this proportionality of our sincerity of conversion to our confidence in prayer, Saint John identifies two types of sin a Christian could commit that would diminish or destroy his love for Christ: venial or mortal sin. A venial sin comes from a lessening of our attention or conversion to the Lord, which is not a complete turning away from him. He admonished us to pray for a Christian brother or sister whom we see growing weak in Christian fervour or slightly distracted in his love for Christ. “If any sees his brother commit a sin that is not a deadly sin, he has only to pray, and God will give life to the sinner—not those who commit deadly sin; for there is a sin that is death, and I will not say that you must pray about that. Every kind of wrong-doing is sin, but not all sin is deadly.” The intention of the prayer he urged us to offer for the venial sinner is for God to restore his Christian fervour or love for God and Jesus Christ, which determines our degree of participation in the life of God through the Holy Spirit. A mortal sin extinguishes this love for God completely in our soul; this defines the evil nature of mortal sin, or sin that is death, according to John. Prayer is not sufficient to tackle this horrible situation. The death of our spiritual or regenerated self in mortal sin is a major and damaging accident we must avoid with everything we possess, relying heavily on the grace of God. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul says mortal sins must not be mentioned among us, not to talk of its commission. It is trampling on the precious blood of the Lamb and a return to the dominion of evil and darkness. A dead soul would need to be re-evangelised.

Once we have repented from our evil ways and decided to embrace the path of righteousness, we must continue on that path and not go back to the evil and dark path. Nobody must need a new bath in the water or to be born a second or third time. Hence, the Church administers the Sacrament of Baptism once in a lifetime. This mystery is illustrated in today’s Gospel by John the Baptist’s words when they told him that everybody is going to Christ. “I myself am not the Christ; I am the one who has been sent in front of him. The bride is only for the bridegroom; and yet the bridegroom’s friend, who stands there and listens, is glad when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. This same joy I feel, and now it is complete. He must grow greater, I must grow smaller.” Our Christian vocation is to grow in our love for Jesus Christ and the Father; we must avoid anything that would hinder the growth of our love for Christ or destroy it. We must embrace everything that will promote the love of Christ and life in the Spirit daily. The key thing, among others, is our daily communion with Jesus Christ in prayer and meditation, as we heard that people were going to him to listen to his word to be consoled, renewed, and healed of their ailments. Let us rejoice and sing a new to the Lord, his praise in the assembly of the faithful, for he takes delight in his people.

Let us pray: Almighty ever-living God, who through your Only Begotten Son have made us a new creation for yourself, grant, we pray, that by your grace we may be found in the likeness of him, in whom our nature is united to you. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.