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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20241219
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DTSTAMP:20260427T133639
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UID:12928-1734566400-1734652799@laycisterciansofgethsemani.org
SUMMARY:Vigils Reading
DESCRIPTION:O ROOT OF JESSE \nFrom a homily by Fr Geoffrey Preston \n◊◊◊ \nJesus does not come of a particularly good family. His family is in fact \nparticularly ungood for much of its past. In the Te Deum we sing to Christ “You \ndid not scorn the Virgin’s womb.” At first sight that seems rather strange \nlanguage to use about the Virgin when she is honored as Mary Immaculate. But \nsurely it is Mary’s ancestry which is in debate here. The hymn celebrates the \nextraordinary condescension of Jesus in being prepared to take not the flesh of \nAdam before the Fall but the flesh of all those generations stretching from Adam \nthrough Abraham and David down to Mary. \nSo we pray to him: “O Root of Jesse.” This means praying to him as Son \nof David\, as son of all those kings after David\, people like Solomon and Asa and \nManasseh and Jeconiah. If he was prepared to come to an Israel and a world \nthat had produced people like that\, then we can fairly expect that he will be \nprepared to come to our world and our hearts with all their accumulated weight \nof sin. We can be confident that he will come to us as we are\, coming through our \npast and making it his own. In this way he will reach us where we are and \ntransform our past so that when we tell the story of our lives we will be able to \ninclude all the mistakes we have made and all the blind alleys we have explored. \nNot that we cease to regret. Not that we excuse ourselves for our mistakes. \nNot that we become complacent about our evil deeds and thoughts and words. It \nis not as though what was once bad has now become good. But if and when the \nMessiah comes to us\, then we can sing the story of our lives as the story of the \npath which he took to come to us\, leaping upon the mountains and bounding \nover the hills as we hear in the Song of Songs. When he comes we can tell the11 \nstory of our past all over again\, as nations retell their history after a change in \ntheir fortunes. \nIt is a mistake to brood over our past. It is a misunderstanding of what \nMessiah means for us to worry about the past. That past is only the raw material \nof a story. What matters is how we tell the story using the raw materials. If the \nMessiah has come\, then the story can be solemnly and gladly sung\, to the \naccompaniment of all that makes for rejoicing.
URL:https://laycisterciansofgethsemani.org/event/vigils-reading-244/
CATEGORIES:Vigils Readings
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