Wednesday December 31, 2003 Homily by Fr. Robert Altier
Seventh Day in the Octave of
Christmas
Reading (1 John 2:18-21) Gospel (St. John 1:1-18)
In the first reading today, Saint John tells us that we know it is the
final hour because the spirit of the antichrist is present in the world. He
says, “Many such antichrists have appeared coming from our own number.” But yet
the one who is the antichrist has not yet appeared on the scene. The spirit of
antichrist is not merely in one person but is in many people and has been
around for 2,000 years, as there have been many people in the spirit of
antichrist who have arisen, and, of course, there are many even in our own day.
The spirit of antichrist is also a spirit of deception, so he points out to the
people that they have an anointing which comes from God so that they have all
knowledge and that knowledge they have is the knowledge of the truth. And he
tells us that a lie has nothing in common with the truth; therefore, he is
writing to the people because they have this truth and they are to hold firm to
that truth.
Now in the Gospel
reading, when we hear about Our Lord coming into the world, Who is the Word of
God, the one Word which God spoke in all eternity, and God Who is truth speaks
only the truth and there is no lie within Him – as Saint John again makes very
clear, because God is the truth and a lie has nothing in common with the truth,
it is not even possible for God to speak something which is untrue – so if
Jesus is the Word of God (and He is) therefore that Word spoken by God in all
eternity is absolute truth, the one Word of truth spoken and in it is contained
all truth. Saint John the Baptist, we are told, came to testify to the truth.
Even though he himself was not the light, he came to give witness to the One
who was coming into the world, Who is the light of the world. Yet, at the same
time, we are told, “The world was made through Him but did not know Him.” And
worse than the fact that they did not know Him, they did not accept Him. Even
when He came to be able to say, “I am He,” they rejected Him. “He came to His
own, but His own received Him not.”
Then there are another whole group of people, and among that group of
people Saint John tells us that these are people who are not born just of
simple natural generation, they are not born by the will of a man, they are not
merely of the flesh, but they are born by the Will of God and they are the ones
who will accept the Word of God. They are the ones who are going to receive the
grace to become truly children of God and to live according to that grace. Now
what we need to be able to recognize is that each one of us is counted among
those numbers. We are the ones who are called to be the children of God, but we
realize that there are many people who are baptized into Jesus Christ and there
are many who do not live as the children of God, but just the opposite. As
Saint John tells us, regarding the spirit of the antichrist, “they came from
our number”, which means that they were people who were baptized but they
rejected the grace of their baptism and they chose sin over righteousness. They
chose the ways of Satan over the ways of Jesus Christ.
It is a very subtle
point. It is very obvious when you look at the two points, Jesus or Satan, but
Satan is not stupid. He is very subtle, the most subtle of all the creatures
that God made. And so he gets us on little points: “It’s not that big a deal.
No one will know. It’s a private thing, after all. It’s okay if you do this.
You can believe that. You don’t really
believe these other things do you? Just don’t tell anyone and it’ll be okay.”
So we do our deeds of darkness in the darkness, and somehow we think that God,
Who is light, is not going to see them and is not going to know. We have chosen
Satan over God. Now if we look into our lives and we see that that is what we
are doing in whatever form it happens to be taking, then we need to reject it
because we realize that if we are choosing a lie over the truth, if we are
choosing to sin rather than to walk in righteousness, if we are choosing
anything which is in violation of the teaching of Jesus Christ as given to us
through His Church, then we have chosen the spirit of antichrist. We have
rejected Jesus Christ and we have chosen Satan; it is just that simple.
We have to look
very seriously as we come now to this last day of the year and we begin what
has been promised (by those reputed to be mystics, anyway) to be a rather
momentous year, a rather interesting one, if nothing else. We have some pretty
serious choices to make. Are we going to choose Jesus Christ? That means to
choose the truth and to live according to the truth, to live according to our
supernatural generation, our rebirth in Jesus Christ, and therefore, to live
the life of Christ, which means to shun sin, to shun falsehood and deception in
any form, and to live according to the truth. The
truth is a Person and the truth is found only in one place, that is, in the
Roman Catholic Church which Jesus Christ Himself has founded, and you will not
find it anywhere else in the world. Period. And so we have that
choice: Are we going to live it or are we not? We can no longer play footsie
with Satan. We cannot say, “Well, I want to look like a good Catholic, but I
also want to do this other thing that I know the Church condemns.” It is not
possible. If we do that, we are choosing hell for ourselves. We need to be very
clear about the choice we are making. A few moments of selfish pleasure for an
eternity in hell, is that the exchange we want? Are we like Esau, where we give
up our birthright as the firstborn of the Son of God so that we can have some
kind of selfishness, some kind of lie, some kind of pleasure, whatever it might
be? Are we the reprobate who looks good on the outside but really is choosing
sin over righteousness?
Jesus came into the
world, He came to His own, and His own accepted Him not. You are His own now,
and you have the choice to accept Him or to reject Him. It is not enough to
say, “I believe that Jesus is God.” We reject Him with our actions; we reject Him
with our choices. He is the fullness of truth and in Him is all truth. If we
have chosen any lie over the truth then we have rejected Jesus Christ, not with
our words but with our choices and our actions. That is what we need to look
at. Do we accept Jesus Christ in His fullness or are we trying to find a way
around the truth, in which case, we have accepted the spirit of antichrist, we
have chosen Satan, and we have rejected Jesus Christ? Jesus came into this
world so that you could be saved, so that you could have a rebirth which is
supernatural, and so that you could have eternal life. The choice lies now with
us and there is no in-between. It is Jesus Christ or it is Satan. It is heaven
or it is hell. It is life or it is death. It is just that simple: the truth or
a lie. Which will we choose?
* This text was
transcribed from the audio recording of a homily by Father Robert Altier with minimal editing.