TRUTH DRIVES AWAY DARKNESS

MONDAY AFTER EPIPHANY SUNDAY

1 Jn 3:22-4:6; Ps 2:7-8,10-11; Mt 4:12-17,23-25

Moving from Darkness into Light

We have celebrated our solemn feast of Epiphany, God revealing his Only Begotten Son, who made his home in our mortal flesh, to all peoples and nations. It is one thing for God to show us the truth so visibly given in our flesh and within our reach and another to take possession of what God has revealed. It is now within our human strength to acquire what God has given us all and make it the hinge of our lives. The Magi did see Mary and her child, but what they did after seeing was an act of worship, which comes from their acceptance of the gift of faith God has given them and owning it by acting correspondingly to the gift. Their action proved that they did not come from their respective nations and domains driven by inquisitiveness but by a genuine desire to know and live by the truth. They saw Mary and the child Jesus Christ for us and also prostrated in adoration on our behalf. Let us own the knowledge they verified for us and follow them in adoration and worship of the true God subsequently.

According to Saint John, the knowledge they gained from their long and tedious journey to Bethlehem and the faith they expressed in the sign of salvation they witnessed is the commandment we have received from God. “His commandments are these: that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and that we love one another as he told us to. Whoever keeps his commandments lives in God and God lives in him. We know that he lives in us by the Spirit that he has given us.” John presents the whole Christian journey as a connected process. The first thing we need to do is to encounter Jesus Christ in his humanity and believe in him. We do this by proxy, using the senses and human perceptions of our brothers and sisters who had the privilege to encounter him physically. After owning their stories, the next thing to explain is how the faith they expressed in God as arising from their narratives of their encounters is justified by the word of God. This illumination of their story with the word of God, which we have been doing through these Spirit-led reflections, is geared toward evoking the same faith in the humanity of Jesus Christ founded on a rich understanding of the word of God. When we possess a faith that is well established in the word of God and the humanity of Jesus, the Holy Spirit will make his home in us and lead us deeper into the mystery of Christ in our private prayers. The process explains the aim of our doctrinal preaching and our spirituality built on the illumination of the intellect by truth.

From John’s explanation of how to test the presence of false spirits, we see why the Dominican spirituality of truth does not condone false devotion but easily unmasks it. “You can tell the spirits that come from God by this: every spirit which acknowledges that Jesus the Christ has come in the flesh is from God; but any spirit which will not say this of Jesus is not from God, but is the spirit of Antichrist, whose coming you were warned about.” A simple way the Church has ensured the truthfulness of the Gospel and the presence of the Holy Spirit for her children in the practice of the faith is to present Jesus always in the company of his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Recall that God created enmity between two parties: Mary and her Offspring on one side and the serpent and its offspring on the other. Hence, the presence of Mary ensures the Gospel is grounded in the humanity of Jesus Christ. We must accompany our faith in Jesus Christ with a devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is a Dominican practice that protects us from being deceived by spirits of darkness. The Gospel tells us of the lands of Zebulun and Naphtali within the region of Galilee; the people were in darkness and ignorance of God’s will. But they saw the great light of salvation when Jesus moved there with his mother, Mary. “Hearing that John had been arrested, Jesus went back to Galilee, and leaving Nazareth he went and settled in Capernaum, a lakeside town on the borders of Zebulun and Naphtali.” His words and works in that region showed the presence of the Holy Spirit, for where the Mother and Child are, the Holy Spirit is always there.    

Let us pray: O God, whose eternal Word adorns the face of the heavens yet accepted from the Virgin Mary the frailty of our flesh, grant, we pray, that he who appeared among us as the splendour of truth may go forth in the fullness of power for the redemption of the world. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.