A Year with the Catechism. Petroc Willey, Dominic Scotto, Donald Asci, & Elizabeth Siegel

in the Creed are his sending from the Father in the Incarnation and his return to him in the events of the Paschal mystery. The focus for the Church’s catechesis on Christ, therefore, will always be on these two topics.

      The Gospels, as we know, give us much more than this, though they, too, have a clear focus on the last three years of his time on earth, and a particular concentration on the final week of his earthly life. There is much that is “hidden” in the life of Jesus.

      The Catechism notes that these two points in the Creed, however, provide all the “light” (512) we need to understand everything else in Jesus’ life. You may have noticed that the Catechism is often helpful in providing this guidance as to which doctrines and teachings shed light on other beliefs that we hold (for example, 89, 388). It is helping us to remember to read the faith as a unity, as a single coherent set of teachings that make sense to us together, as one whole. The Catechism is also reminding us by this that there is a hierarchy of truths. This does not mean that some teachings are truer than others; it is rather that some are more fundamental and essential and that they help us to understand the other truths (see 11, 90, 199, 234).

      In the celebration of Christ’s life in the liturgical year these two teachings are marked by Christmas and Easter. In the liturgy we celebrate the great truths that we proclaim in the Creed. And it is again these great feasts and seasons that shed light on the rest of the Church’s liturgical year. “Beginning with the Easter Triduum as its source of light, the new age of the Resurrection fills the whole liturgical year with its brilliance” (1168).

      Day 73

       CCC 514-521

      Christ’s Whole Life Is Mystery

      The essence of today’s section lies in the opening two paragraphs. The Catechism first distinguishes mystery from curiosity (514). Curiosity is only appropriate for earthly matters — it can lead to mild interest. The revelation of God’s mystery, on the contrary, concerns the “divine sonship and redemptive mission” of Christ (515), and the only appropriate response to this is our wholehearted belief and commitment — to believe that Jesus is the Christ and God the Son so that through this belief we may have life in his name (see also 203, 430). The Gospels reveal this mystery. The materials in the Gospels were selected for this reason, so we read the Gospels for the sake of deepening our belief in Jesus and to ground our lives securely on his loving and saving presence.

      CCC 515 explains how this revelation of Christ’s mystery occurs: through Christ’s humanity which is a sacrament. The Gospels record Jesus’ “deeds, miracles and words,” which lead us to recognize that we are in the presence of the invisible reality of the divine Son and his work. The word “sacrament” is taken from the Latin sacra, “sacred,” and applied to Jesus’ humanity it means that his humanity was both the sacred sign and the sacred instrument of his divinity.

      Because Jesus is the divine Son who assumed our humanity, everything he says and does reveals God. CCC 516-518 explain three aspects of this: Christ’s whole earthly life is revelation of the Father, is redemptive, and recapitulates human life, restoring it to its “original vocation” (518). Recapitulates means that, as the “head” (in Latin, caput) of the human race, Jesus represents us, living human life in all its “stages” and dimensions as it is meant to be in God’s plan. We can now join ourselves to Jesus, becoming members of his Body, with Jesus as our true head. Then it is not only we who live the Christian life, but Jesus himself who, as our head, lives in us (519-521).

      Day 74

       CCC 522-534

      The Mysteries of Jesus’ Infancy and Hidden Life

      How do we now live the new life of Christ? How do we join ourselves to his redemptive work? Or, to put this in a better way: How does Christ join us to himself in and through our daily life, inviting us to respond, so that we can benefit from his having assumed our humanity and united it to his divinity? The Catechism begins to walk us through the answer to this question, starting from Jesus’ infancy and hidden life. Everything in Jesus’ life, we remember, is revelation of the Father, is redemptive, and is a recapitulation of human life and history for the sake of its restoration. This includes those early years and the times before Jesus began his public ministry.

      The first thing you may have noticed is that he accomplishes this through the work of the liturgy and the sacraments. Look through these paragraphs and notice all of the sacraments, the feasts, the seasons, and the holy days. This is where his life is communicated to us now. This is where the grace to live the new life in Christ flows out upon us.

      The second place where he joins himself to us is in the most ordinary events of “daily life” (533). When we are poor (525), are called to “become little” (526), are persecuted (523, 530), are learning obedience to our parents (532), are living out our family life (533) — and also when we learn that the Father’s call invites us to a response that takes us beyond all earthly loyalties and commitments (534), since Jesus living in us is, above all, always about his “Father’s work.”

      In these ways, then, we become “sharers in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share our humanity” (526).

      Day 75

       CCC 535-540

      The Baptism and Temptations

      As we read these passages concerning Jesus’ baptism and his temptations, we remember that the Catechism wants us to read these as mysteries of Jesus to which he joins us so that we live them and he also lives them in us (521).

      Jesus’ baptism and his temptations belong together, for the Holy Spirit who descended upon Jesus during his baptism immediately drove him into the desert to be tempted by the devil (Mk 1:12-13; CCC 538). His baptism is his voluntary identification with us in the misery of our sins so that through his faithful obedience to the Father as one of us “in all things but sin” we might be adopted as beloved children of God. The Father delights in the Son and in this ministry of mercy and redemption (536). The Holy Spirit immediately drives him into the desert to endure the temptations facing humanity, so that Jesus might recapitulate the temptations that Adam faced (539).

      The meaning of the two events together can be summed up in the verse from the Letter to the Hebrews, “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning” (Heb 4:15; CCC 540). The baptism concerns his entering into our weakness; the temptations, his rebuffing of all attacks testing his “filial attitude toward God” (538).

      The Letter to the Hebrews goes on to invite us to have utter confidence that we will receive all the grace we need to have this same “filial attitude” in the face of temptations that assault us in our daily lives (see 4:16). We can know that it will be Jesus, who has already “vanquished the Tempter for us” (540) who will be living in us. He has united us to himself so that we never need face difficulties on our own or through our own strength.

      Day 76

       CCC 541-553

      The Kingdom

      Today we continue reading of the way in which Jesus draws each of us to share in the mystery of his life. As the Catechism will explain, the single Greek word for “mystery” has two dimensions to it and so came to be translated into Latin by two terms, mysterium (mystery) and sacramentum (sacrament): “sacramentum emphasizes the visible sign of the hidden reality of salvation which was indicated by the term mysterium” (see 774). Jesus’ whole life is the mystery in both these senses, for all that he said and did, all that is visible in him, is the sacramentum that draws us into the hidden mysterium of his divine sonship and saving work.

      This mystery is expressed in “the Kingdom of God,” a phrase which depicts