A SERMON FOR THE FEAST OF THE CIRCUMCISION
The tradition of circumcising a
newborn male went back many thousands of years before our blessed Lord
underwent this little operation on the eighth day after he was born. When Abraham was 99 years old, God appeared
to him and commanded that he and all the male members of his household should
be circumcised. After the circumcision,
God
sent angels to inform Abraham that his wife Sarah would give birth to Isaac,
the long-awaited heir to Abraham’s
tradition. God gave instructions that
the ceremony should be performed on the eighth day of life, and Isaac was the
first to undergo circumcision on this eighth day. From that time on, every male Jewish baby has
undergone this ceremony on the eighth day, and so today we celebrate the
anniversary of the circumcision of the Christ Child when, on this eighth day
since Christmas, he shed the first drops of his Most Precious Blood for all
mankind.
In Jewish tradition, the
circumcision, or brit as it’s called in Hebrew, is the most important of
all the ceremonies and regulations of the law.
Indeed, many of the Jewish sages
say that the mitzvah of circumcision is equal to all the other mitzvot
of the Torah put together. The
obligation to circumcise on the eighth day even supercedes many of the Shabbat
laws, so the brit is performed on the eighth day even if it is a day
when surgery would generally be forbidden. It may be delayed only for the most serious
reasons, such as the health of the child.
As befits so solemn a ceremony,
there are many traditions that accompany it.
Many have the custom to stay up the entire night before the brit studying
the Jewish law. In Sephardic tradition, this all-night vigil is called Brit
Yitzchak, “Covenant of Isaac.” In some communities, it comes with a
celebratory meal of its own. There is an ancient custom that children come over
to the home (earlier in the evening) and say verses of Torah in the presence of
the baby. We have no scriptural
references to the details surrounding our Lord’s own Circumcision, but we can
imagine that his mother and foster father were diligent in keeping the
traditions as best they could in the difficult circumstances they found
themselves in.
When we study the beautiful laws
God gave his chosen people, we may wonder why we don’t obey those laws today. It’s simply because our Lord fulfilled all
these disciplinary laws by his life, passion and death. Instead, in the New Testament, we focus on
the great law with which he fulfilled all the minutiae of the old law: to love
God with our whole heart and mind and soul, and to love our neighbor as
ourselves. On this new law all the old
laws had depended for their existence.
While we retain the natural and divine laws contained in the Ten Commandments,
we no longer observe the multiple disciplinary laws of the Old Testament. We’re quite happy to eat bacon and shrimp thank
you very much, and no, we don’t observe the ceremony of circumcision anymore, unless
perhaps for its health benefits. We don’t
keep kosher, or follow the hundreds of laws contained in the scriptural books
of Moses. We recognize them as applying
only to the people of the Old Testament, to keep them in line with God’s will
at a time before the Saviour delivered them from the slavery of sin.
In one sense though, it is a pity
we have forgotten much of the wisdom contained in these laws. While we rejoice in their fulfillment by
Christ, our knowledge and understanding of God could certainly be enhanced by
studying the profound and often beautiful significance of the ancient
ceremonies and traditions that the Jewish people had been commanded to observe. After all, they were given to them by none
other than God himself. In the case of
circumcision, it was a ceremony that created a lasting sign of a man’s personal
covenant with God, a bond which transcends the human mind. Through placing this
sign of our bond to God at the place of human reproduction, it sanctifies the
act of procreation. It turns it into
something sacred, spiritual, and special—beyond
the natural. This sanctification of the marital act is in complete opposition
to how the world views it, and is the reason why the abuse of the marital act
and the natural law is such a desecration of this gift of God.
Another interesting feature of
circumcision is that it’s performed on the eighth day of life. Why the eighth day? God created the world in the span of a week,
seven days. He began the work of
creation on a Sunday, and rested on the Sabbath, the seventh day. At this point, creation was complete. The number seven, therefore, has always
signified the idea of completion, the rational, natural order of things. To go beyond this completion, into the eighth
day, is to reach beyond the natural, to expand into the super-natural. We reach out beyond the limits of our world
and peek into the infinite.
This is no doubt why God
commanded that circumcision should take place on the eighth day of life. As a sign of the covenant between God and his
people, it was meant to show man his potential to grasp the infinite, the
eternal. Think of the rainbow—long
before Abraham, God had made his first covenant with man when Noah’s Ark rested
upon Mount Ararat after the Great Flood.
The sign of God’s covenant with man was a rainbow in the heavens. And how many colors are in the rainbow? Seven.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Together these colors form the spectrum,
outside of which we cannot conceive of any other color. What would an eighth color look like? We simply can’t imagine it, it is “beyond”
our comprehension, in a dimension of the super-natural. The number eight takes us into this
dimension, and today, with our blessed Lord’s circumcision, we enter into that
dimension of the infinite, far beyond the capacity of our own limited length
and width and depth, past, present and future.
It’s for this reason that the
homosexual community chose the rainbow as their symbol. It was to make a mockery of the covenant
between God and man, the covenant that would later be made by the act of
circumcision in which a mark was placed in the place of reproduction. The sanctification of the marital act as the
means by which reproduction would occur, was now perverted into the very
opposite by making the act an end in itself, with no other purpose than to give
pleasure and satisfy the whims, natural and unnatural, of the fallen nature of
man. It was a different kind of
covenant, made by man, for man, a desecration of the gift God
gave us, and the exclusion of God from this most sacred human act. God meant us to participate in his creation
through the marital act, by which we would share in his creation of a new
human, body and soul.
It is no coincidence either, that
today is the first day of a new year.
Christ was born on December 25th and so the Circumcision of
our Lord always occurs on the Octave day of Christmas, January 1st. It’s the mirror image of Creation, now
signifying a supernatural new beginning; the first day of Creation was a Sunday,
and so was the eighth day after the beginning of Creation. In the same way, New Year’s day is always the
eighth day after Christmas Day—this year they both fall on a Saturday. On this eighth day after the birth of our
Lord, we pass through the doorway into the New Year, and at the same time
celebrate the spiritual introduction of
our Lord into his life of covenant with God.
The traditions of our Jewish
brethren, you see, are not to be dismissed out of hand. “I came not to abolish the old law,” our Lord
told us, “but to fulfill it.” There are
lessons to be learned from the Old Testament, and many of those lessons are
profoundly spiritual. It’s no wonder
that the Novus Ordo church of Vatican II chose the Feast of the Circumcision as
the first Holyday of Obligation to suppress.
Without the lessons we learn from it, our world now finds itself
floundering in the sin of unbounded lust, and without the sense of the infinite
that enables us to bridle the base yearnings that that deadly sin of lust brings
in its wake. We would do well to
contemplate this spiritual lesson of today’s feast, and launch out into the New
Year with the resolution to learn it well and obey its directives.
No comments:
Post a Comment