Praised be Jesus Christ now and forever. As a preface to my preaching today, I want to say how very blessed I believe I am, I think all of us are, that the Holy Spirit has gathered so many of us here in the Cathedral this morning.
I particularly am aware of the presence of some of the elect, some who are candidates for full communion for the Easter Vigil. I'm very much aware of those who are candidates for confirmation in their parishes this year, who are brought here, who come here, as part of their preparation for confirmation. I am particularly grateful for the presence of so many deacons who assist us in the priesthood, and for my brother priests, that we should be able to have this time on Holy Thursday in order to be joined in our Lord's sacrifice.
I was at the Seminary last week for a discernment weekend just to greet those who were there. There were some questions in the Q&A session that were a little embarrassing. I am sure Father Birney remembers them very well and, undoubtedly, he will mention them at some embarrassing point later on in life. But one of the questions was: What is my favorite feast day to celebrate in the Church? I didn't expect that. And, I didn't give a very intelligent answer. But it occurs to me that I could rightly have answered that this Eucharist, the celebration of the Consecration of the Chrism and the blessing of the Holy Oils is certainly among the greatest blessings I have every year. In part, it's because the Church is so clearly manifest here this morning. Both in Lumen Gentium and in Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Father's of the Second Vatican Council say that the Church is a sacrament of what Christ intends the whole human race to be, and that the sacrament of the Church is no more visibly present, no more illuminated in the world than when we are gathered, all of us, in this particular Church. I love the Church and so I love being with all of you today.
My sermon, not to scare you off, but my sermon is a little longer than I thought it would be because I began with what I considered a fairly simple goal, which is to be a kind of a coach, to help all of us pray together, to enter more deeply into the liturgical action and into the liturgical prayer. I want to begin with a reflection on the Sacred Chrism itself and, if there are any here who are particularly devoted to the Oil of Catechumens or the Oil of the Sick, I have to apologize and say that what I am about to mention can be applied analogously. In what I want to say about the Chrism I'm not going so much rely on how it is foreshadowed throughout the Sacred Scripture, though that is principally the mold in which the consecration prayer for the Chrism is cast. When we pray that prayer, you will hear how, even from the time of Noah, in the life of Moses and Aaron, and in the experience of King David, our Chrism, the Sacred Chrism, was foretold as an instrument of God's saving action.
My remarks about the Chrism today are more about how it functions as a natural symbol, a sacrament, or perhaps better said, more technically said, a sacramental, a sensible signification, and in this case, of God the Holy Spirit. I want to mention two ways that it seems to me the Chrism signifies, the way it works. First of all, the Sacred Chrism is what I would describe as a cohering presence. Oil clings to whatever it touches. You can't wash it away like you can so many other things. And, the Sacred Chrism is a suffusing presence because it is filled with balm, with perfume. And so it is, while subtle, an unmistakably sensible reality. And in both of these dimensions, the Sacred Chrism very aptly symbolizes the presence of the Holy Spirit and the working of the Holy Spirit, because it is the work of the Holy Spirit to suffuse, to penetrate, to be irrevocably indelibly present.
Isn't that the sense of how those sacraments that are especially associated with the Sacred Chrism, we speak of as imprinting an indelible character? A technical word to talk about the suffusion, the ineradicable presence of the Holy Spirit, and to think about the Sacred Chrism as perfume, as filled with the balsam and, therefore, filled with a sweet aroma, is to understand that the Holy Spirit's presence in our lives is efficacious, and yet, sometimes faceless or anonymous, a kind of invisible presence. The same sort of point our Lord was making with Nicodemus when he described the Spirit as like the wind blowing where he will. An invisible, a somewhat faceless presence, but suffusing and permeating our lives in order to reshape every dimension of our existence into the image of Christ, to stamp us, to suffuse us with the form of Jesus Christ. And to understand the Chrism for how it symbolizes is to help us understand how the Church uses it.
First of all, paradigmatically in Confirmation. This is so much the case that the name of the Sacred Oil is, in some languages, the very name for the sacrament of Confirmation. In Italian and Spanish, I know it's so. It's the case with the Byzntines – chrismation. This is so much the case with the Sacred Chrism that to try to perform the rite of Confirmation without it would be for that rite to be invalid. And, the Chrism, as I mentioned, is used for the other sacraments that imprint a sacred character. For baptism – as a sealing anointing after to exemplify and illustrate what has been accomplished by water in the Word. Similarly, in the priestly ordinations of presbyters and bishops, the Chrism is used as an illustrative rite for what has been accomplished by the imposition of hands in the invocation of the Holy Spirit. Chrism is used for the dedication of churches and altars.
In all of this, the Sacred Chrism functions as an exemplary sacramental for Christ himself. In fact, you will hear in the sacred liturgy the statement that the name for this oil comes from the name that we have added and made part of the very proper name of Jesus of Nazareth. This is Chrism because it is about the Christ. Because Jesus is the Anointed One as we heard him affirmed for us, to us, in the Gospel from St. Luke today, taken from his sermon in the synagogue of Nazareth, as he identified himself as the one who fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah. This is because the Holy Spirit clings to the very flesh of Jesus Christ, to his humanity. He suffuses all that is human in Jesus and makes the humanity of Jesus the presencing of God in our midst. Sometimes he suffuses the humanity of Jesus quite subtly in a way that is hidden except to the eyes of faith, but he is this anointing, this perfume that makes every act and every word, and ultimately, the Passover of Jesus himself, the presence of God the Savior in our midst.
And above the Christological meaning of the Sacred Chrism, we ultimately must understand that this anointing is priestly because the end, the goal, the aim of the outpouring of the Spirit of Christ into the humanity of Jesus and into our humanity is to empower him as he empowers us. (I should have that the other away around shouldn't I?) To empower us as he empowers Jesus for this work, for reconciliation, for the atonement of sin, for the gift of ourself to the Father in perfect love. And that's why the Chrism is used in confirmation, in baptism, in holy orders, to anoint the church and to anoint the altar, because each of these realities is, in its own way, about the sacrifice, about the self-offering. Once refused by the Old Adam and now given willingly by the New Adam and all those who are touched by the New Adam.
I'd like to simply take a moment now in my reflection to particularly address the priests because this is, as our Holy Father has designated it, the Year for Priests, and speak a little more at length about the relationship between the Sacred Chrism and our own vocation. As I said, this connection is exemplified in the liturgy that we have been chrismated, anointed at ordination. You, on your hands; we, bishops, on our heads. And I have thought a lot about this, especially in my ministry in celebrating confirmation. I do so many confirmations that I believe that when I die, the rest of my body may rot and corrupt but my thumb will be uncorruptable! I am a chrismation machine. (Thank you for laughing at my jokes; that encourages me. I appreciate it.) But, at least two points in the confirmation liturgy, it is made very clear that the role of the bishop and priests who are associated with us in confirming, our role is to be contagious, to be vehicles, instruments by which the Holy Spirit is passed on. As it says, if I can quote it correctly, the Holy Spirit, who was given to the apostles and then to their successors at Pentecost, is now given to you sacramentally in confirmation.
In that sense, are we not, as priests, vessels of the Sacred Chrism in the sense of being vessels of the Holy Spirit? And like any such vessel, we are shaped by what we hold, by what we contain. Yes, as St. Paul says in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, we are vessels of clay, but that does not deny what we contain, what we hold, what we are instruments of. Rather, our own clayness is a sign, a manifestation, of how good God is and how the gift that we communicate is so much more, so transcendently greater than who we are or what we have. And it always reminds me, it always reminds us – no? – of how we are in need of the people's prayers. This is our service – to be instruments of the Holy Spirit. And to single out priests for these few moments is not in some way a slight to the lay faithful, since in the Christian ecology, it's never either/or. It's not like somehow dignity in the Christian family is a zero sum commodity. Rather, priests and people, we exist as complementary, each defines the other because the very existence of each depends upon the other. No people without priests; no priests without people. To think of them apart is as useful of thinking of one hand clapping.
The priestly mediation of the Holy Spirit results in the people of God having an immediate contact with the Lord. Now, to some people, people without faith, people without catechesis, that might seem like a contradiction. How can there be a mediation that results in immediate contact? But it is the greatest of logic, the most profound insight to us who know that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, and that through his humanness, through his touch, through everything that is fleshly about him, God is immediately present to us and touching us. The ministerial priesthood exists, holy orders exists, precisely for the priesthood of the baptized and the confirmed. We will see the truth of this, all of us, in a few days at the Easter Vigil. It will be self-evident that it is by the power of the Holy Spirit that each of us has his or her own proper place in the Body of Christ.
And so, with this in view, I ask you please to join with me in ardent prayer as Christ consecrates the Chrism. Pray with all the longing of your heart that every use we make of the Sacred Chrism will be efficacious. And, let your prayer please be filled with thanksgiving for what God has already done in his Church and, as for what Father Solanus used to say, for what God will do in the future. We are, as the text we heard from the Book of Revelation, the Book of the Apocalypse, reminds us, a chrismated priesthood, an anointed people. We bare the Holy Spirit. He clings to us. To you, my brother priests, I ask that when we make the commitment after this preaching, you will please let the Holy Spirit move you again to be unconditional in the gift of yourself.
Let me say again how grateful I am for all that you do. I think it's quite meaningful that it is your hands, our hands, that are anointed because the human hand is the great tool of the human person, and the anointing of our hands is a sign that we are instruments for the building-up of a holy people, a royal nation, a priesthood for God. Let me say how much I appreciate how hard all of you work and the sacrifices all of you make in order to be good priests.
As we offer the Holy Eucharist today, let us remember that it is the descent of the Holy Spirit that accomplishes the sacrifice. That he comes upon the bread and wine and makes them the anointed flesh and blood, the living and life-giving flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Let us call upon the Spirit to come in great power so that you and I will be the sacrifice for which we were created by the Father of the Lord Jesus. I hope all of you have a very, very blessed celebration of the Sacred Triduum. Thank you.
