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...

Our meditations upon the woodcuts of Gustave Doré, by which he illustrated the Grande Bible de Tours, reach the climax of Our Lord’s Passion with Luke 23:44-45— It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the  afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the Temple was torn in two. By the standards of its day, the Jerusalem Temple was weird. The very idea that there ought to be but one Temple for an entire nation, for a dozen feuding federated Tribes, baffled most observers in the ancient world. Great cities could have scores of temples, of every deity and design, each housing a cultic image, a statue of the given god in glory. Some of these were wonders of the world: Zeus at Olympia, Artemis at Ephesus. Yet the Temple of the Hebrew God stood empty—empty!—just a big blank space with some cherubs set around it, and simple sacred box of acacia and gold (this latter being lost before the time of Christ). Here there would be one Temple, one...

In our fourth woodcut from La Grande Bible de Tours, Gustave Doré illustrates John 19:18-19— There they crucified him, and with him two others—one on each side and Jesus in the  middle. Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read: Jesus of  Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Pilate doesn’t care if you’re a god. But the common folk must have no king but Caesar. Jesus is arrested for blasphemy, yet the Romans have no dog within this fight. They care little for matters of Jewish Law. Religion, for them, is a complicated thing, yet so long as people pay their taxes and allow the trade to flow, Rome will let them worship as they like. This proves doubly true for Judea, as the Romans respect little so much as antiquity, and the Torah certainly boasts an impressive pedigree. Where others must offer their pinch of incense to Caesar, Judeans shall be allowed to sacrifice for the Emperor rather than to the Emperor. It’s a handy little loophole. But if there’s one thing ...

The third in our series of biblical woodcuts by Gustave Doré illustrates Matthew 27: 33-34— And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they  offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall; but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. Jerusalem in Jesus’ day had spilled beyond its borders, with settlements cropping up outside the fortified city wall. Golgotha—Calvary, in Latin, both names referring to “skull”—began as a limestone quarry on the west edge of the city. The Romans used a high outcropping or hill here as a site of public execution, with crucified victims on full display for those entering, leaving, or simply passing along the road. We don’t know how Golgotha earned its name. Legends abound. Some say that criminals were beheaded there, or that the hill looked rather like a skull, or even that it had been the burial site of Adam once upon a time. The Romans certainly didn’t care. They bored post-holes in the top to hold their crosses, crucif...

I have a melancholic disposition. I don’t mean that in the modern sense of sad and vaguely depressing, but in the medieval sense of melancholic as introverted and thoughtful. Rowling readers might term it Ravenclaw. Books have been my portals to worlds of endless learning ever since my youth, and when silence seeps into my bones it provides to me a wondrous rejuvenation. My grandparents’ property abutted an old church and graveyard, ancient by American standards, with headstones dating back to the 1600s. We used to take walks amongst the monuments, deciphering their weathered engravings, some fallen over like loosened teeth. We would read the inscriptions and imagine their stories. My grandparents rest there now too. I’ve always been drawn to liminal spaces, those borderlands betwixt past and present, man and nature, Christian and pagan, life and death. Autumn of course is perfect for that, with holidays like Halloween. I never was much of a hunter myself, but I understand why people l...

As far as unsung holidays go, few seem to me more deserving of a modern revival than the Nativity of St John the Baptist, known to Shakespeare as Midsummer’s Day. John’s is one of only three birthdays commemorated on the Christian liturgical calendar—quite a coup, considering that the other two are Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary. John the Baptist is a wonderfully wily, irascible figure, offering a truly unforgettable introduction to the New Testament. He’s famous for preaching brimstone in the badlands, baptizing various and sundry questionable characters, wearing coarse camelhair clothing, and sustaining himself on locusts and wild honey. What’s most important about John, however, is that he serves as Forerunner to the Christ, the prophesied voice crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord!” In other words, everything that Jesus does, John does first. John has a miraculous birth; he proclaims the coming Kingdom of God; he gathers a cadre of disciples; h...

For most folks, Easter lasts but a day: a morning of formal worship followed by an afternoon family feast. But in point of fact, Easter is an entire season on the calendar of the Church, one that lasts a full 50 days, beyond the Ascension to Pentecost. I’m not above using this to my clerical advantage, as I may have been known to introduce liturgical modifications with the assurance that it would “only be for Easter.” Muahaha. It is a remarkable claim of the Christian community not simply that Jesus rose from the dead but that He then continued to appear to individuals, groups, and significant crowds for 40 days following His death and Resurrection. As I’ve pointed out before, both at Candlemas and Lent, 40 holds symbolic importance in the Bible, as ancient peoples knew that it takes roughly 40 weeks for a pregnant woman to come to term. It is a number indicating new life, new birth. The nature of these Resurrection appearances proves no less remarkable. Jesus’ conquest of death soars ...

Holy Week is Sunday for the entire year. Early on in our history, the Church celebrated but two holy days: Sunday, the weekly day of Resurrection; and Pascha, our Lord’s annual Passover from death to life. While most Christians throughout most of history have continued to celebrate Jesus’ Resurrection as Pascha, we in English call it Easter. Even so, you can hear echoes of the Greek in terms such as Paschal Lamb or Paschal Candle—for indeed, Jesus is our Passover Lamb. In liturgical traditions, Holy Week marks the culmination of the Church year, celebrating with great solemnity and jubilation our Lord’s Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. It all begins with Palm Sunday, when Christ rides triumphally into Jerusalem to shouts of “Hosanna!” while crowds lay their cloaks and palm branches before Him. Keep in mind that Jesus has journeyed to Jerusalem several times a year throughout His life in order to celebrate the biblical holy days, especially Passover: the foundational story of God...

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...

In the early centuries of the Church, Christianity tended to be rather selective regarding whom we would or would not Baptize. It wasn’t a matter of proving one’s worth; the grace of Christ is freely given to sinners, superabundantly, profligately. But people had to know what they were getting into. Jesus promises His followers a cross, after all, and for nearly 300 years Christians had been persecuted by the Roman Empire. The baptismal symbolism of death and resurrection—joined to Christ’s own death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again, and to Christ’s own eternal life already begun—would have been far more than mere sentiment in those days. Christians courted death simply by professing our faith in Christ. Indeed, many were killed while awaiting their Baptism, thus held to have been “baptized in their blood.” In ancient Rome, catechumens could expect a three-year period of preparation, prayer, and formal instruction for at least an hour a week. Jerusalem sped thi...

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unt...

For 300 years Christianity survived as an illegal religion, sporadically persecuted by the might of the Roman Empire. This meant that a life spent witnessing to the Good News of Jesus Christ often culminated in a brutal and very public death. It’s not that all Christians were killed, of course; but it happened regularly enough, and especially to the most prominent in the community, to affect the entire life of the Church. Indeed, our word for witness, “martyr,” has become synonymous with someone who dies for their faith. And we had to make sense of it, didn’t we? For 300 years the followers of Christ were crucified, beheaded, lit on fire, and thrown to wild beasts. What then did all this violence and suffering mean to the people of God? Where could we find Christ in this? Eucharistic celebrations went underground, literally, as Sunday worship took place in catacombs beneath major cities, atop the bones of the martyrs. To this day, many Christian altars look rather suspiciously like...