The Circumcision of Christ

It is New Year’s Eve and the vigil of the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. In less than 40 minutes, the year 2008 will begin. Following is the gospel for tomorrow’s solemnity mass that I would like to consider tonight:
“The shepherds went in haste to Bethlehem and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known the message that had been told them about this child. All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds. And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart. Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told to them. When eight days were completed for his circumcision, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:16-21).

Do you and I have the humility and simplicity as the shepherds did to run with urgency to find the Holy Family, especially to find the Son of God? Do I seek Him out? Am I amazed by the gospel or do we take it for granted, quickly turning my attention and heart to other concerns? I need to follow Mary’s example who took all these amazing events in and kept them in her heart to consider and unpack them. The shepherds left the Holy Family glorifying and praising God; do I do the same with the good news of salvation, bringing it back to my ordinary, everyday life? Does it affect how I life my life?

These miraculous events changed forever the lives of Joseph and Mary and I would assume the shepherds, too. All of these people who first encountered the living God made man had their hearts focused fully upon Him. They had an undivided heart that rejoiced in His birth, and their hearts were full for the joy of His arrival and for the love that enraptured their hearts. In proportion to how completely they opened their hearts in the direction of He Who Is Love their hearts were full and at peace.

The focus is the heart. When Jesus was eight days old, as was the age-old practice, he was circumcised and given His name. Circumcision in the Old Covenant is the pre-figurement of baptism in the New. They have a number of similarities: they are the passage way to entering the people of God, one is named as a part of the ritual, it is usually performed on infants, and it leaves a lasting mark. God added circumcision because of Abraham’s sin with Hagar as a penance and reminder that life does not come from our resources but is given as a gift by God. When Abraham fell, it was because his heart was hard and did not trust the promise of God to give him a son.

Circumcision is also a symbol of the need to cut away the stony outside of our heart so that we can have a new heart of flesh. It says in Deuteronomy 10:16: “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn.” Circumcision at its deepest meaning is a matter of the heart as Paul said: “real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal” (Romans 2:29).

The majority of Paul’s argument in Galatians is that we no longer need to be circumcised because circumcision was a symbol added because of sin, but now the reality has come. The reality is that Jesus’ heart was circumcised when He gave Himself up fully as a sacrifice on the cross and His heart was pierced. Circumcision is no longer needed because now we have been given the circumcision of Christ: baptism. We are baptized into Jesus’ death, and Jesus died because He trusted and obeyed fully with His heart. In baptism we are given Jesus’ faithful, crucified, pierced and resurrected heart so that we can be faithful, crucified, pierced and one day rise again, too.

In Paul’s letter to the Colossians he says much the same thing: “In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Colossians 2:11-12). Baptism is our circumcision and the real circumcision. In baptism we receive our new hearts, our new tree of life that we needed ever since the Fall when our first parents turned their hearts away from God and His singular prohibition.

As we celebrate today the circumcision of Jesus as an infant, we can look ahead to when He fulfills that Old Covenant sacrament when His body is nailed to the tree and His Sacred Heart is pierced. Today we can remember and celebrate our own baptism when we received the circumcision of Christ and re-dedicate our hearts to Him that they may be His alone, for that is why we were baptized in the first place. We can fulfill this holy day of obligation by going to mass and receiving Holy Communion which is the fulfillment and celebration of our baptism. In The Sacrament, we receive the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus, and the Body we receive is actually Jesus’ heart. It is all about the heart. It is all about eating the tree of life.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

Short Summary of Theory

Blessed Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe! Giving our heart, our tree of life, into her protection, into the protection of our rib, our dear and powerful mother, we have complete confidence that she will keep our tree strong, and so we will have life; she will help us obey and trust her Son, and in so doing we will have life and have it abundantly. Rivers of living water will flow from our heart, and we will bear fruit twelve months of the year. She is the follower of Christ par excellence and the sure way to her Son.

A friend of mine regularly visits another blog; yesterday (was it only yesterday?), he alerted me to the fact that a discussion on that blog was addressing the question of whether or not the Fall had anything to do with sex. I had never been to that blog, but he told people about this site. Some of them commented about what I was saying on that site, so I responded over there. Today’s entry will be what I wrote over there; if you want to see the discussion going on there, go here. It is a rather long discussion, and the material relating to this blog begins toward the bottom.

Here is what I posted there tonight:
Fr. John Wauck wrote, "...Pullman is wrong to describe the Church as spending the last 2,000 years advocating a theological position that hasn’t even existed for 2,000 years, that flies in the face of the scriptural text, and that the Church not only never officially taught but also had to combat and condemn on a number of occasions?" From what I understand, Pullman is saying that Christianity has been saying since its inception that sex is bad; the Church surely condemns such a position. I am not sure if Father's comment was meant as a response to my blog and the theory I am defending there. Maybe not, but if it was, that is a misunderstanding of my theory. In fact, my theory doesn't even make sense if marital relations are not good; my theory makes most sense if marital relations are the highest good of the natural world.

The hinge of my theory is that the tree of life is the believing, trusting, obedient, loving heart and that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is marital relations. As far as I am aware, the Church has never condemned such a position. If it has, I need to disavow myself of my error; please let me know. As someone who desires above all to be a faithful son of the Church, I am "prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of the faithful" (Humani Generis #36). However, at this moment, it is my understanding that my theory has never been condemned; if it has, then there is no further discussion needed.

Marriage is a "great mystery" symbolizing the relationship between Christ and His Church. Nothing is more important, other than the Trinity itself, than the relationship between Christ and His Church, and therefore, there is nothing greater on this earth than marriage. God gives us free will, hides Himself, and tests us to see if we truly trust and love Him. In the Old Testament, there is no one tested as severely as Abraham, other than the man and the woman. His test? He was to kill his only son, the son through whom God promised to give Abraham descendants as many as the sand on the seashore.

He asked our first parents (Eve was only named after the Fall because she has just conceived Cain) to forgo the highest natural good, which is the symbol of the highest supernatural good, to obtain the highest supernatural good. Their trial of faith, which went beyond their intellect, was to tell them to be fruitful and multiply but not to have relations. Relations are good, and that is what the woman saw, but God had a higher gift planned. He wanted to give them more than the symbol (marriage), He wanted to give them the reality (mystical marriage). We are all called to holiness, but there is no holiness without deep prayer; the endpoint of prayer is mystical marriage, and the reason there is no marriage in heaven is because we are all married to God as members of His Body, the Church.

My main point is that God wants you and me as His spouse; He calls each and every one of us to the deep prayer of mystical union. That is true for priest, nun, husband, wife, and single from every occupation.


Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

Now Her Name is Eve

After the Fall, the man realizes he is naked, hides, and is found by God; then God questions him and reveals to him the consequences of his disobedience; the very next thing the man does is rename his now pregant wife the mother of all the living! She sought after a baby, and now she has conceived. Since she is now a mother and the first mother of the human race, the man names her as mother of all. From now on she is Eve.

Yesterday I gave some possible re-translations of Genesis 3:22-24. I don't know enough to properly re-translate, but by looking at my Hebrew resources, I hope these are possible ways to re-configure the text. I have no desire to just make up what I want the Bible to say; on the contrary, I want God's Holy Word to be translated and understood as correctly as possible. Translators have to make countless choices when they translate, especially when the words used have a multitude of meanings. The context of words and phrases plays an enormous role in obscure and chameleon-like words. Depending how the translator understands the sentence's surrounding context will determine how difficult passages are translated. Since most translators have never given much if any credance to my theory (which of course I see as correct), they will not arrive at a correct translation.

It makes no sense to me that God would guard the way to the tree of life to keep man from eating it and living forever. God wants nothing more of us but to eat of the tree of life and to live forever (with Him in heaven). Understanding the tree of life as the heart, God obviously still wants Adam and Eve to trust, obey and love Him and to be with Him forever in Heaven. Nothing would make Him happier.

One of the main points of the rest of the Old Testament is that we have hard hearts. Over and over again it becomes painfully clear that we don't trust, love, and obey God and that the problem the Fall caused was that we need new hearts. Ezekiel prophesies in 36:26: "A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh."

One way to keep the Genesis text as it is is to see the expelling from the garden as a symbol which shows how Adam and Eve were cast out of themselves and no longer knew or were true to themselves. It indicates how they were cut off from the tree of life, and that would be so because with their sin caused by lack of trust in God, they have lost their true heart and only have a dead, stoney heart remaining. The primary reason Jesus came to this earth and suffered, died, and rose again is to provide you and me with a new heart, a heart that believes, loves and obeys God. At every Eucharist, we receive that heart anew.

A final thought tonight is that Eve names her firstborn, Cain. "Cain" means "gotten." Since the woman was striving to get a child and that was what the whole Fall was about, when that child is born it would be normal to call his name "gotten," for now she has "got" him. As Planned Parenthood says, "Every child a wanted child," this was the first wanted child. It did not take long for this first person ever to be born to end up on "America's Most Wanted." This beginning of the human race's effort to bear children turned out horribly, for he was a murderer. The very first person born was a murderer, and of his own brother at that! The proper attitude toward children is openness and is expressed as this: "Every child a welcomed child."

I don't know if I mentioned an extremely important point. It is not that God did not want Adam and Eve to be like Him and to have children. Nothing could make God happier than for them to be like God and to have a child. After all, that is the reason why He created us. The problem is that they did not trust God to provide the child, nor did they trust His prohibition not to have relations. At some point in the future I will talk about how Abraham has a very similar test which he temporarily fails when he has Ishmael with Hagar and finally passes when he offers up Isaac, the one through whom descendants as many as the stars of the sky were promised.

Tomorrow I want to talk about, among other things, the element of wife stealing present here in the Fall.

Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2007.