Christ is risen, Alleluia! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!
I am back from a couple of days in the mountains where I was preaching a retreat. Well, the Lord was preaching to me a beautiful retreat through the beauty of holy nature and even more the beauty of his Holy Church. Today is the feast of Saint Athanasius. Because I’ve been looking back now over this wonderful gift of 40 years of priesthood that the Lord has given to me, I was reminded of an event when I was a young priest at a retreat here in Saskatoon. We had a retreat master, an Oblate, who from his background as missionary was presenting to us the way in which he thought we should proclaim the Lord.He said, “Remember we have to show with our lives that Jesus Christ is a saviour of the Lord in the Lord. He is a manifestation of the Lord.” And I put up my hand and I said, ” Father, I think you’re using the wrong article. He is not a, but the saviour. He’s not a manifestation of the Lord, He is the manifestation.” And he looked at me and he said, “No, Father, he’s a manifestation, a way to salvation.” Hmm. Well, I remember one of the priests who was there came up and said to me, “Thank you, you are just like Athanasius who got into trouble. You’re passionate and you’re young and you are going to get into all kinds of trouble.” He said, “But you are right.”
Of course, I was right because that’s the truth, that’s our faith. He’s not a saviour, Jesus, [one among] other people, they’re all saviours. No, He is the saviour and one cannot be fully faithful to God except through Him. Now, what happened to me? I’m here. What happened to that that oblate? He became a bishop, of course. I have the better reward.
And that’s akin to what Athanasius faced. The 4th Century Church was deeply threatened by heresy, as Saint Jerome was to write, ” One day the world awoke and to its dismay discovered that it was Arian.” The powers of the world and Church had abandoned the true faith as Christians throughout the world had become Arians. Arians were those who were intellectually and philosophically heretics. They wanted God to be so completely and utterly One that they denied that Christ was God from all eternity, rather they taught that Jesus by God’s grace was welcomed into Godhood but born a human being. Remember how I talked about the difference between a and the? It all boiled down to the rejection by the Arians of a word that Nicaea had taught dogmatically when the Church had gathered at Nicaea and with the Holy Spirit proclaimed that , as we say in the Nicene Creed, Jesus was consubstantial, of the same substance as the Father.” The Greek word was homoousios,.
The Arians, being clever, had two ways of getting their point across. They always lost the argument if ever they had truthful discussions because what they were believing didn’t stack up against Scripture or the teaching of the Church. So, the first thing they did was attack their opponents, vilify them. They accused Athanasius, who was the bishop of Alexandria, of cheating, of being a crook, of having prostitutes, you name it, just dragged him down. And the other way, was to use “fudge” words. So, they used the term homoiousios. They put an extra little “i” in that definition and it meant that Jesus was of “similar” substance as the Father. Wiggle words that allowed them to deny the fullness of God’s revelation in Jesus. And Athanasius, almost alone with the bishops of Alexandria and Liberia and a small group of people stood with the truth. Oh yes, with one exception during his life, that one who stood with him was the Pope of Rome.
Who stood against him? The emperor, most of the bishops. The laity, not so much. The intellectuals and the theologians loved these clever ways of fudging so that they could be intellectually at peace with their own ideas. Athanasius said, “Homoousios, This is the faith,” and five times he was exiled, condemned to death real sufferings because so important is it that we be faithful. He was no shrinking violet before his enemies, for they were the enemies of the Lord. Here is a part of one of his homilies:
“You want to be children of the light, but you do not give up being children of the world. You should believe in penance, but you believe in the happiness of the new times.You should talk about grace, but you prefer to talk about human progress. You should proclaim God, but you prefer to preach man and humanity. Bear the name of Christ, but it would be better if you bore the name of Pilate. You are the great corruption because you are in the middle. You want to be in the middle between the light and the world. You are masters of compromise and march with the world. I say to you, you’d better leave with the world and abandon the master whose kingdom is not of this world.”
He could have preached that today. He could have said that to the leaders of the Church and the World and to so many of us, probably even to me.
I remember once giving a talk to a group of school trustees. Remember how we had those WWJD bracelets, “What Would Jesus Do?” I proposed to them a different bracelet because in the Book of Revelation it says, “If you’re neither hot nor cold, I will (what?) … Vomit you out.” Blech. So, I said we should probably put on our wrist DMJV, “Don’t Make Jesus Vomit.”
Live in the light, love in the light, live in the joy. Don’t look down, look up. There might only be few who stand faithful, but even if that “few” is just you remember Jesus is the Master and through the Master the world will be saved.
Let us be holy, let us be saints. Amen.