Homily for Tuesday after Epiphany

Homily for the Tuesday after Epiphany

January 7, 2025
Collect
1 John 4: 7-10
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.

by Sebastiano Mainardi

God’s “Only-Begotten Son has appeared in our very flesh” (Collect).

The Son of God became a human being; “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).  (As a camper, I like John’s literal text:  he “pitched his tent among us.”  Of course, that likely comes from the nomadic culture of the ancient Middle East.)

The Fathers of the Church—St. Athanasius, for example—liked to say that God became a human being in order that humans might become divine.  We have a prayer to that effect in our preparing the gifts at the altar.  That’s where our prayer today takes us:  “may we be inwardly transformed” by the Son of God.  His grace is transformative.  Moreover, he has given us the precious gift of himself in the Eucharist, so that by consuming his flesh and blood we might be transformed—that we might become what we eat, that we might be incorporated into the body and blood of Christ.

Becoming divinized thus is life.  The Only-Begotten Son came “into the world that we might have life thru him” (1 John 4:9).  So divinized, we’re empowered to act like him, to share God’s love for humanity—beginning, of course, with the real people in our lives.  “Everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God” (4:7), for he or she’s been transformed inwardly by our Lord Jesus.