Monday After Epiphany
Monday, January 6, 2025
Christmas Weekday
USA: Saint André Bessette, Religious
1 Jn 3:22—4:6/Mt 4:12-17, 23-25 (Lectionary #212)
The Responsorial Psalm promises the Messiah: “I will give you all nations for an inheritance” (Psalm 2). The truth of Christ can enlighten and shine through every culture on earth. Christ’s love can transform and bring to perfection every human endeavor. All of creation has been redeemed by Jesus, and all of creation can be the medium through which his glory shines. Jesus and the Church say with the Roman poet: Nihil humanum mihi alienum puto: “Nothing human is foreign to me.”
1John 3:22 to 4:6 warns us against thinking that what can be already is. We look for the good in everything human, but we still have to “test the spirits to see whether they belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” If we reject nothing, it means nothing when we accept anything. There is truth and falsehood, good and evil, right thinking and wrong thinking. How can we know the difference?
The first thing to look for is love. “Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them.” His commandment is that we should “love one another.”
His commandment is also, “we should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ.” But we have to bear in mind that John was writing specifically to the Christian community. We do not judge non-Christians by a faith they have not received, or perhaps have received but on a level deeper than words.
A test for Christians, however, is whether they “acknowledge Jesus come in the flesh.” Christians find Jesus in the down-to-earth reality of life and worship in his body on earth, the Church. Christians express Jesus by embodying his truth and love in the concrete expressions of daily life. A “spirituality” not embodied in the physical actions of “religion” is not the spirituality of the Incarnate God.
Matthew 4: 12-25 shows God’s divine optimism about the human race and his confidence in the winning power of grace. When John is arrested Jesus “withdraws” to Galilee to preach to a “people who sit in darkness… in a land overshadowed by death.” He follows his own later advice to his disciples, “When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next” (Matthew 10:23). But continue preaching. We should never presume that any new person, group, culture or milieu is unable to hear God’s word — if we present it as we should. God’s promise is, “I will give you all nations for an inheritance”
Initiative: If you want to know Jesus, accept him as universal Savior. Be an evangelizer. Offer him to everyone. Validate your words by the consistent witness of a life only faith can explain.
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