Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Dt 18: 15-20
Second Reading: 1 Cor 7:17, 32-35
Gospel Reading: Mk 1:21-28

On the mountain at Horeb, the Israelites begged that they might never again “hear the voice of the Lord” or see the “great fire,” lest they die. Accordingly, God said to Moses, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own kin; I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them everything that I command him.”

A prophet was one who spoke, acted, or wrote under God’s extraordinary influence to make known the divine counsels and will. Through the prophets, God taught his people “to look forward to salvation,” as the Church says in her Fourth Eucharistic Prayer.

Jesus claimed to be the promised prophet when he said, in the synagogue at Nazareth, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; therefore, he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and release to prisoners: to announce a year of favour from the Lord.”

We see how Jesus backed up this claim in this Sunday’s Gospel Reading, when he gave commands to unclean spirits, and they obeyed. Astounded, the people recognized something unprecedented: “a new teaching – with authority!”

Christ, God the Son made Man, “is the Father’s one, perfect, and unsurpassable Word,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting St. John of the Cross. “In him he has said everything; there will be no other word than this one.”

Speaking for God, St. John continues: “What answer or revelation can I now make that would surpass this? Fasten your eyes on him alone, because in him I have spoken and revealed all and in him you will discover even more than you ask for and desire.”

In fact, says the Catechism, anyone wishing for some other vision or revelation is “guilty not only of foolish behaviour, but also of offending [God], by not fixing his eyes entirely upon Christ and by living with the desire for some other novelty.”

Here lies the appeal of New Age: “some other novelty,” some alternative, says the Vatican document on the subject, entitled Jesus Christ: The Bearer of the Water of Life.

Those whose understanding of the faith is weak “mistakenly hold that the Christian religion does not inspire a profound spirituality, and so they seek elsewhere,” it says. (As G.K. Chesterton said, “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried.”)

New Age has been fed by “ancient Egyptian occult practices, Cabbalism, early Christian gnosticism, Sufism, the lore of the Druids, Celtic Christianity, mediaeval alchemy, Renaissance hermeticism, Zen Buddhism, Yoga, and so on,” the document says, many of which “are explicitly anti-Christian.”

For example, New Age claims that humans “are born with a divine spark” that makes them “essentially divine, although they participate in this cosmic divinity at different levels of consciousness.” On the contrary: divine life involves “being transformed” in soul and body “by participation in the sacramental life of the Church.”

At Jesus’ Ascension, “that which till then had been visible of our Redeemer” did not vanish, but “was changed into a sacramental presence,” said Pope Leo the Great. Accordingly, the Catechism says, “it is through the Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help toward salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained.”

The Pope, in particular, fits the definition of “prophet”: as the successor of Peter – the rock on whom Christ built his Church – he speaks, acts, and writes under the extraordinary influence of the Holy Spirit to make known the divine counsels and will.

In fact, he and the other bishops have “taken the place of the apostles” Christ chose, in such a way that “whoever listens to them is listening to Christ and whoever despises them despises Christ and him who sent Christ.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English.”  All the materials (video and print) are available online free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 20, “Matrimony” will be available Jan. 31.