Templar Edification

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to  them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his  understanding and his answers. -Luke 2:46-47 There is a sense in which the Gospels were written backwards. New Testament scholars refer to “the messianic secret,” the notion, firmly established in the text, that Jesus’ nature and identity are fully revealed only in the Resurrection. Before that He is misunderstood and misapprehended, even by those closest to Him: His Apostles, His Mother, His brothers and His sisters. Easter unveils Him not only as Christ and King but as the Word made flesh, God Himself incarnate. The paschal mystery illuminates all: all that went before, and all to follow after. The earliest Christian confession was the amazed and breathless cry, “Christ is Lord!”—with full understanding that Lord, κύριος, is the established Hellenistic euphemism for the Hebrew Name of God. The Resurrection is the b...

March 25 passes largely unobserved in much, if not most, of the modern Western Church. Yet for the majority of Christian history this has proved an auspicious date indeed. March 25, precisely nine months before Christmas, commemorates the Annunciation—sometimes known in English circles as Lady Day—when the angel Gabriel announced to the Blessed Virgin Mary that she would bear the Son of God. This event marks the beginning of the Incarnation; that is, of the Creator becoming one with Creation by taking on human flesh. Regardless of our stances on when human life begins, we cannot deny that each of us begins within the womb. And so Mary becomes what Martin Luther called finitum capax infiniti: the finite containing the Infinite. She is the New Ark bearing forth the New Creation. She is, in short, the Theotokos, the Holy Mother of God. To deny her this title would be to deny the divinity of her Son. Medieval tradition understood that March 25 marked not only the date of Jesus’ death on th...