A Reflection for the Memorial of St. Anthony, Abbot
You can find today’s readings here.
Do not forget the works of the Lord!
What we have heard and know,
and what our fathers have declared to us,
we will declare to the generation to come
The glorious deeds of the LORD and his strength. (Psalms 78:3 & 4bc, 6c-7, 8)
It dawned on me recently that the year 2033, which when I was younger might have seemed like a year when we would have jetpacks and flying cars and fully-immersive virtual realities, is approaching us. 2033 will be the 2000th anniversary of the death of Christ. Of course, we do not know for sure what the exact date and time was when he died, but it was roughly around 33 AD right before that year’s Passover weekend. Then, as we all know, three days later, he rose from the dead and spent 40 days with his disciples, imparting upon them the sacred duty of spreading his word throughout the world on the very first Pentecost.
Reflecting on this realization, I realized how odd it was to have the 2000th anniversary of anything at all. The Catholic Church is traditionally considered to have been founded during the aforementioned first Pentecost, also in 33 AD, which means that the end of Jesus’ ministry is really just the beginning of our ministry as led by St. Peter and his successors. Pope Francis is the most recent of these, the 266th pontiff and head of the Catholic faith, standard bearer of a tradition that goes back two millennia.
I started thinking about this when someone mentioned to me that they thought Jubilee years did not happen often enough. There is one happening right now, with many faithful already having traveled to Rome to partake in the celebrations and to receive plenary indulgences, but the next one will not happen until 2050. By then, I will be in my mid-50s and the last time a Jubilee year happened, I hadn’t even turned three years old yet. (That’s not counting the extraordinary holy year, the Jubilee of Mercy, declared by Pope Francis in 2015.) It seems an awfully long time to our mortal perspectives, ones we measure in days and months and lifetimes. But the Catholic tradition has persisted for far longer than that; 25 years is a blink of an eye to a 2000 year old faith.
In today’s responsorial psalm, I saw these thoughts reflected: “Do not forget the works of the Lord! What we have heard and know, and what our fathers have declared to us, we will declare to the generations to come, the glorious deeds of the Lord and his strength.”
“We will declare to the generation to come,” the Scripture says, “the glorious deeds of the Lord.”
True enough—but what did the writers of the psalm mean by “generations” exactly? It means your children and it means your children’s children, but that is often where the perspective ends. It does not stop there. This Psalm is older than the church and was included in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and is part of the Old Testament. In Genesis, the Lord appears to Abraham during a famine and tells him that, despite how bad things may seem right now, if he stayed true to him, “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky.”
We are still part of that great promise that God gave to Abraham and that Jesus fulfilled. That also means that we have to keep our end of the bargain, too. We have to remain steadfast in our commitment to the Lord and to the values which we were entrusted with. This faith tradition has weathered persecution, schism and corruption for thousands of years and yet it endures. Humanity’s temporal existence lacks perspective; it is impossible for our mortal minds to comprehend the fullness of this millennia-long project of which we are a part.
Our part in this project is not merely to ensure that the church endures during our lifetimes and our children’s lifetimes, but to make the church good and strong for the next 2000 years as it has been in the last 2000 years. We as Christians have done a lot during our history so far, and there is much work yet to do.
