Too many people today are without good, strong preaching, to the detriment of all. Share the good stuff.
Was there a GOOD point made in the sermon you heard at the Mass for Christmas (jabbed or not!), either live or on the internet? Let us know what it was.
Tell about attendance especially for the Traditional Latin Mass. I was getting reports that it is way up.
Any local changes or news?
Those of you who regularly viewed my live-streamed daily Masses – with their fervorini – for over a year, you might drop me a line.
I have some written remarks about the TLM Mass for Christmas – HERE
Loading ...
Pingback: Your Sunday Sermon Notes: Sunday in the Octave of Christmas Christmas – Via Nova Media
Are you still offering live stream daily Masses? I had looked but could not find them any more.
had one of the scripture profs from the seminary. he’s very engaging and bright and not afraid to challenge the congregation from an intellectual standpoint.
i thought he made an odd choice for the chasuble (white with red trim, when gold would be more customary within the octave), but he called it out specifically as appropriate to the commemoration of St. Stephen that ordinarily occurs on this date.
he started by giving some grim facts about the hostility that secular culture has toward the family including the staggering number of divorces instituted every year.
then he turned to hope. he briefly described the bar mitzvah, which our Lord would likely have experienced by this point in His life – being a “son of the law” or “son of the precept”.
Our Lady and her most chaste spouse faced a great crisis when, in their journey together with their fellow-travelers they literally had lost contact with God Himself (including a brief digression about this being the only place in Scripture where the word synodos is used). they set out to restore their relationship with God and, in going to the Father’s house, did just that. so when we face crises, turning to prayer and the Sacraments is the best way to strengthen our own families.
I am befuddled by the sermon and subsequent research, Father. Our Deacon stated that the Gospel demonstrates that Jesus learned of his divinity during his sojourn in Jerusalem and that was why Mary and Joseph found Him at the Temple.
This sounded wrong to me so I spent the day reading and I am now confused. This prevents me from answering my children’s queries about it.
It would help if the Catechism contained an explicit answer to the question but the present one at the Vatican website does not. It appears that CCC 471 – 5 and 478 point to His always knowing He is God. (I didn’t come up with that on my own. I read a bunch of articles and they kept referencing those citations. They matched up and made sense so I included them here.)
I truly wish I could ask the Deacon without offending or expect my Pastor to answer but I suspect those sources are a dead end. So, what say you, Father? Did the Christ know He is God or learn that He is God?
Yes, Jesus knew He was God. Having both a perfect divine nature and a perfect human nature, His human intellect was informed by His divine nature from the moment of His conception. The Lord had infused knowledge, but He also had experiential knowledge that informed His human intellect.
We know from Scripture that the Lord “increased in wisdom” (Luke 2:52). Therefore, in a human manner He learned things, experientially, even if He knew the perfection and essence of them in His divinity. I suspect that the child Jesus had no trouble learning and remembering, especially anything having to do with language, being the Eternal Word.
That said, human beings learn in stages of knowledge. Our understanding of something can change over time. Infants and small children can know things but not be able to express their knowledge profoundly. Later, they can. Christ always knew who He was, but He also learned who He was in the experiential plane. In His humanity He had to hear the prophecies about Him for the first time, for example. Of course He would have instantly understood them and connected them in a way that we can’t fathom, since His human intellect was beyond our and it was informed by His divine knowledge to the extent that it needed to be.