New Creation
12th Sunday of the Year
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I am right now in an especially rich few weeks of priestly ministry. Last Saturday, I celebrated the wedding of two friends—faithful Catholics and wonderful people. Next Saturday, I will do the same for another happy couple. About ten days ago, I celebrated the funeral Mass of the grandfather of my best friend from high school, who lived a full and holy life. I also recently became the godfather to another dear friend’s baby daughter, baptized another baby myself, and gave a seven-year-old her first holy Communion. Yesterday, I had the privilege of serving as a master of ceremonies at the ordination of six new priests for the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
It is a tremendous grace to be a priest, and every day of priesthood is its own sort of blessing, but not all weeks are like these. These weeks of grace upon grace more than make up for those that instead feel like email upon email and meeting upon meeting!
What makes these moments—weddings, ordinations, baptisms, first Communions, and even funerals—so beautiful is that they express visibly and tangibly what Saint Paul means in today’s second reading that, “whoever is in Christ is a new creation.” These sacred moments testify that when we are incorporated into Christ, something old dies and something new begins to live.
To grasp more fully the profundity of this “new creation,” we make sure we understand the “old creation” just as well. Because, as Saint Thomas Aquinas says, “grace builds upon nature,” and if we misunderstand the “old” we will fail to grasp the mystery of the “new” that replaces it.
There is a doctrine that on the surface seems, like most doctrines, something only people like me care about—that is, people who like to think about God in a speculative way. But this doctrine that I’m about to explain is, like most and in fact all doctrines, really indispensable to the whole Christian system. Like all great and seemingly obtuse ideas, this one has a fancy Latin name: creatio ex nihilo, which means creation out of nothing. The claim this doctrine holds is pretty simple: God created the world out of nothing, and before God created anything there was not anything at all.
That might seem like a “given” (and I hope it does!) but there are in fact those, even Christians, who instead hold that God created the world out of some pre-existing matter that is co-eternal with God himself. According to this view, God is more like the sculptor working with a shapeless block of marble, chipping away to remove the excess and shaping it to be what he wants. This might be a nice image to think about, but as any sculptor will tell you, the marble is just as much responsible for the final product as the person wielding the hammer and chisel. The sculptor must work with and even negotiate with the marble to make it what he desires it to be. Now, if we transpose this image directly to God, then we have a God who creates not from his omnipotent power but by means of crafty deliberations. God is more like a congressman who must lobby around the house chamber acquiring votes for his proposal than an absolutely monarch who commands and rules by simple fiat. And this God—like the congressman!—is really powerless and weak instead of almighty and strong.
I said that even some Christians hold to this view, but why? Why would anyone want to believe in a God who can’t do what he wants? It might surprise you, but the reason isn’t as bad as you might think: We can more easily have a real relationship with a God who is close to us in our weakness than a God who remains infinitely beyond us in his power. Or so they think.
What in fact is so great about the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo—that God made the world top to bottom out of nothing, and without him nothing was made that was made—is that because God is all-powerful without qualification, he can be all-close without qualification. In a sort of funny logic, the higher you go up the lower you can go down. The more that God is exalted and the farther he is outside the world, the deeper and more intimately he can be inside of it. Because God is the foundation of all being, everything that is only is within him. In other words, God can be closer to you than you are to yourself, only because he is completely and utterly beyond you.
I could go on about the implications here, but let me get right to the point: Because God created everything out of nothing, he has the power to re-create everything he has made, from top to bottom, inside and out, how so ever he likes. That means that when Saint Paul says we are a “new creation” in Christ he means that God has exercised his absolute and sovereign authority as Lord of all creation to make us, at the level of being, something new. This “new creation” happens at the moment of our baptism, when we die and rise in the waters of the font with Christ in his death and resurrection, and from then on bear the life of God within us. And just as the “old” creation was a creation from nothing into something, this “new” creation is such a radical transformation that the new bears no resemblance to the old at all.
Now, just like when God created the world, the act of creation happened in an instant but took time to unfold and flourish, so too the new act of our re-creation in Christ that happens at baptism takes our entire Christian lives to grow, blossom, and bear fruit. And for much of that time, the seed buried in the ground might seem to us to be dead, but we must not stop thinking it is very much alive.
But we need reminders. We need encouragements that the divine life is at work within us—that God is finishing his work of re-creation in us. How can we be so encouraged? Go to a wedding, a baptism, a funeral, an ordination. See what the Christian life looks like alive in others, and you will start to notice how it is already living within yourself. See what it looks like for two people to commit themselves entirely to each other and the family they will raise. See what it looks like for men to lay down their life in service to the People of God as priests. See what it looks like for a young woman to make perpetual vows as Jesus’ bride in religious life. See what it looks like for a family to commit themselves to raising their son or daughter in the faith. See what it looks like for the soul good and faithful Christian to be commended to the Lord and their body committed to the earth. Look and see these things, and you will say, “new things have come,” and, thanks be to God, the new creation has happened and is happening in my life right now.
These moments are sacramental, meaning, their visible appearance is translucent. We should see in them—through them—God at work, bringing his creation to perfection in the re-creation he accomplishes by sending his Son and his Spirit into the world. And by them we should be inspired also to live, no longer for ourselves, but for him who died and rose again for us—that the world may also believe and say with us, “behold, new things have come.”
Homily preached June 22 & 23, 2024 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen and Saint Thomas Aquinas Parish
enjoyable to read what I could not hear on Saturday.