The Feast of Beholding Jesus

Liturgy is fleshy, concrete, material; it is the prayer of smoking resin, sloughing wax, swirling wine and water; it is the remembrance of God made man gutted on a Cross; it is the celebration of a grilled Lawrence, a gouged-eye Lucy, a Fr. Damien, skin bulboused by love. There is more spiritual prayer, more angelic prayer, the imageless contemplation of Sts. John and Teresa, or of the Greek Fathers of the Philokalia, but liturgy is distinctly flesh-bound.

As liturgy is fleshly and concrete, it is fitting that most feasts are as well. Most feasts celebrate either a human person or a concrete event. There are exceptions — the feasts of the angels, of titles like “Mary, Mother of the Church” or “Christ the King” — but they usually still have some concrete connection. The angels we celebrate are those who appeared in the guise of men; the titles we celebrate belong to Mary and Jesus, both of whom walked the earth in the flesh. The events we celebrate are mostly — as befits Christians — events in Christ’s life, from His conception, birth, circumcision, and presentation, to His Baptism, to His entrance into Jerusalem, His Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension.

But there is a gap here: between the Baptism and Palm Sunday, the events of Christ’s life are rarely met in liturgical celebrations.¹ The Byzantine Rite celebrates certain events and parables in the Sundays before the Great Fast and after Pascha,² and Christ’s actions might be touched upon obliquely, as in the feast of St. Andrew the First-Called, but most of the time of Christ’s public ministry is present in readings, and not in feasts. Certainly, none of these few celebrations will match the splendor of the Great Feasts. Understandably so, as great events should be greatly celebrated, yet there is a wonder in Christ’s years with His apostles, His years conversing with men, that could be better recognized: Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle aimed to recognize it.

Bérulle (1575–1629) was a French priest and cardinal (though he refused every bishopric, whether suggested by pope or king); though he was an advisor and ambassador for King Louis XIII and helped bring the Discalced Carmelites to France, his main work was the erection of the Oratory of Jesus, inspired by St. Philip Neri’s Oratory of Divine Love. Though, like most French orders, it was eradicated during the French Revolution, and it has remained small after its rebirth,³ it had strong influence in its prime, among members and non-members alike. The most famous among those influenced are St. John Eudes, St. Vincent de Paul, and St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort.

Instead of a traditional religious order, Bérulle’s Oratory was meant to be a means for diocesan priests to live a common life and to grow in holiness. “Many cannot, ought not, and will not be religious, who would remain idle, frustrated in their particular houses, unknown, unemployed, and uninstructed in their profession.” Through the common life of the Oratory, though, “they find solace.”⁴ This edifying common life for priests was not the only charism of the Oratory; it also needed a particular devotion. The various orders, in their charisms, have “shared the robe which [Jesus] left, mounting onto the Cross, in sharing among themselves the variety of [His] virtues and perfections, through which they serve [Him] on earth, some having chosen penitence, the others solitude, others obedience, as the mark, as the object, and as the principal exercise of their institution.”⁵ And what did Bérulle choose as the distinguishing mark of the Oratory? To Jesus he declares:

I request of You that our life, our state, our difference on earth and in heaven, be derived from You and from Your sacred humanity, and that, int his special piety, devotion, and servitude towards the mystery of Your Incarnation and of Your humanized divinity and deified humanity, be our life and our state, our spirit and our particular difference among the other holy and honorable societies that are in Your Church . . . We choose, as our mark and principal difference, this particular piety and devotion towards You and towards Your sacred humanity, towards Your life, Your Cross, and Your spirit, towards Your glory, Your grandeurs, and Your states, and, generally, towards all Your mysteries, having a desire and design to renew our love, our belonging, our dependence, and our servitude towards You.⁶

In short, the Oratory’s charism was devotion to Jesus.

It is an odd choice, considering that all Christians are devoted to Jesus, but Bérulle was true to his word. After all, he named it the Oratory “of Jesus,” and his major theological works are the Discourses on the State and on the Grandeurs of Jesus and the incomplete Life of Jesus. Even the patron feast of the Oratory was the newly-formulated “Solemnity of Jesus.” It was Jesus Himself, and servitude to Him,⁷ that distinguished the Oratory; it was the mysteries of Jesus, the mysteries of His state, which they venerated most. “State,” for Bérulle, had a connotation of permanence; thus the title of his masterwork refers to the singular “state,” not “states,” of Jesus. Even through the different parts of His life, through the course of His different births,⁸ there was still a single, permanent state in Jesus, manifested in them all.

This state shone forth in all of Jesus’ mysteries and deeds, even during the day-to-day course of His “voyaging life,” His transitory life on earth, before His death. It is fitting, then, that, alongside the Oratory’s titular feast of the “Solemnity of Jesus,” Bérulle also wrote the office for another feast: the “Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ Conversing with Men.”⁹

“Conversing,” here, comes from a verse of Baruch, which reads, in the Vulgate, “After this, He was seen on earth, and He conversed with men” (Bar 3:38). It is easy to see this as a prophecy of the Incarnation, and thus it is read during the Byzantine Vigil for the Nativity. It foretells God’s becoming visible in the flesh, God’s dwelling and living with mankind, for “conversing” here means much more than “holding a conversation with”: it means that God made man spends time with men, fraternizing with them. Bérulle focuses on this, and he makes his feast celebrate, not the hidden years of Christ’s infancy and youth, but the years when He truly conversed with men, the years of His public ministry. And he does not abandon the first half of the verse either: in conversing with men, Jesus was seen by them, and, seeing Him in the flesh, they saw God through Him.

The elongated subtitle of the feast emphasizes this: this feast is “to the praise of Him and of those saints who merited to behold Christ acting among men, and were worthy to dwell in that age.”¹⁰ As an epigraph, Bérulle slightly alters a line from Isaiah: “They saw the glory of the Lord and the beauty of our God” (Is 35:2). But how did they see this glory? After all, “truly You are a hidden God, the God of Israel, the Savior” (Is 45:15).¹¹ God is hidden, but He reveals Himself: “not an angel, not an elder, but God Himself came and saved us” (Is 63:9); “behold, I Myself will seek My sheep, and I will visit them” (Ez 34:11); “Worship and rejoice, Daughter Sion: for behold, I am coming, and I will dwell in your midst, says the Lord” (Zec 2:10).¹² As the Matins hymn sings:

So pleaded by the ages,
So preached among the Fathers,
So yearned-for by the angels,
lo! God’s Son arrives.¹³

Jesus is God Himself coming to save His people, and the hidden God revealing Himself to them, in the flesh. Yet isn’t our flesh a veil? How can the flesh of man reveal the glory of God? For Jesus’ flesh is truly human flesh; it is our flesh, as St. Augustine points out: “What would that man who is Christ merit, if you took away grace? . . . Take away that grace, what else is Christ but man? What else but you?”¹⁴ Bérulle emphasizes this in other writings: “He seems to appear as only simply clothed in our humanity and mortality, and He converses as man with men”; “They who saw Jesus walking, talking, and conversing upon earth, saw nothing of the secret and of the mystery which eternal wisdom had hidden in Him.”¹⁵ Thus, “in the days of His flesh” (Heb 5:7), the glory of God was hidden in Jesus. And yet those who conversed with Him on earth can declare, “We have become beholders of His greatness.”¹⁶

Certainly, the flesh is a veil for the divine glory; certainly, those who conversed with Him could not see Him in His fullness. (The closest they came was at the Transfiguration.) Yet “incomprehensible God makes Himself comprehended in this humanity; ineffable God makes Himself heard in the voice of His incarnate Word; and invisible God makes Himself seen in the flesh which He has united with the nature of eternity.”¹⁷ The glory of God shone from Jesus, shone through His flesh, even if not fully. Those who conversed with Him saw this, and that is what drew them to Him. The passages Bérulle picked for the lessons of Matins are very clear about this. “For if He had not something starry in His face and eyes, never would the Apostles have immediately followed Him, nor would they who came to understand Him have rushed” to him, says St. Jerome.¹⁸ Jerome is even firmer in another passage: “Certainly, His splendor, and the majesty of the hidden divinity, which also shone in the human face, could draw beholders to Him from the first glance. For if this force is said to be in magnetic stone and amber, so that they join rings and blades and rods to themselves, how much more can the Lord of all creatures draw to Himself those whom He called?”¹⁹ As the Matins hymn sings:

Nothing shines so splendidly,
Nothing sounds so presently,
Nothing works so mightily,
As Jesus, Son of God.²⁰

It was the Apostles’ great honor to behold this glory, to behold Jesus in the flesh. Yes, the glory is still cloudy, for the flesh is still a veil, but it is not simply that: there is something special here, in God enfleshed, something different from the heavenly glory. “In this baseness, there is an incomparable grandeur, and in this dearth, an inestimable treasure, a treasure which earth alone possesses at that time, and which heaven itself seeks and adores on earth.”²¹ To see Jesus in the flesh, as the Apostles did, was “certainly no puny prerogative,” as St. John Chrysostom states, “whose greatness Christ showed in these words: ‘Since many prophets and just men desired to see what you have seen, and they did not see’ (Mt 13:17).”²² “Blessed are the eyes which have seen what you have seen, and blessed the ears which have heard what you have heard.”²³ They are blessed, for they have beheld what was long prophesied, what was long awaited: the soul’s groom in the flesh.

Whom the Bride in songs
Sings as white and rose,
And Whom, when shook by love,
She seeks within her garden,

We, happy, find Him here.²⁴

“We,” says the hymn: but the truth of the matter is that we are not the Apostles; we are not those conversing with Christ on earth; we no longer see Him in the flesh. For we live after the Ascension, which is “a mystery of separation, since it separates Jesus from earth,” and, likewise, from us.²⁵ Most of this Office is focused on the joy of Christ’s conversing on earth, of His being seen in the flesh, being beheld with our eyes, walking on earth (“. . . and they will adore the prints of Your feet . . .”).²⁶ Yet, at Second Vespers, the tone changes, and we begin to hear of Jesus’ absence: “As long I am in the world, I am the light of the world: walk, while you have light” (Jn 9:5, 12:35).²⁷ “While” means that this presence is not unending: there will be a time when it is not. The chapter expands on this loss: “It behooves Me to perform the works of Him Who sent Me while it is day: there will come night, when no one can work” (Jn 9:4).²⁸

There will come night, when the glory of the day, the glory of the Sun dwelling upon earth,²⁹ will vanish; there will come night, when none shall behold His flesh; there will come dark night. “There will come days, when you will desire to see one day of the Son of Man, and you will not see” (Lk 17:22) — such is the Office’s final antiphon.³⁰ There will come days: days that, in truth, are night.

We live in this night after the Ascension, when “what the angels saw in the clarity of their light” — and, we might say, what the Apostles saw with their blessed eyes — “we must apprehend in the obscurity of our faith.”³¹ This is the night of separation, the dark night in which Mary Magdalene lived for thirty years after the Ascension; this is the separation that Jesus Himself performs. Magdalene met Him, resurrected, at the sepulchre, and yet He departs from her, as Bérulle says, rebukingly, to Him: “At the same instant that she finds You, she finds in You a harder stone than that of the sepulchre that Your angels had taken away for her. For her, You are a stone, not of stumbling, truly, but of separation, and You Yourself strike the blow of this separation.”³² After this separation, “Magdalene does not want to live on earth, for she no longer sees Jesus there. Magdalene cannot go to heaven where He is, for the body hinders her. Thus she is, she lives, she dies suspended between heaven and earth, separated from earth through her love, separated from heaven through her powerlessness.”³³

This separation is not from hatred; Jesus still loves Magdalene, but it is with a harsh love: “I see here a separating love, for Jesus is in heaven, and Magdalene on earth; I see here a crucifying love, for Jesus unites Himself to her, but as crucified, and, what is worse still, He unites Himself to her as crucifying; for it is proper to the spirit and love of Jesus to crucify, and thus to crucify His dearest souls.”³⁴

If Magdalene, who saw Jesus and was separated from Him for thirty years, was crucified by His love, what will we suffer, who never had the chance to behold Him in the flesh? Quite likely our love is not as strong as Magdalene’s, and the suffering of separation is proportional to the love of the separated, yet we can still suffer. Magdalene had a few years to see His light, the light of His flesh, before being plunged into the crucifying night; we, born out of time, dwell always in that night.

Yet all is not night. True, we were not blessed to see Jesus in the flesh; we shall not have that chance until Heaven. But we are not wholly abandoned. We can still meet Christ: in the Sacraments, in prayer, in the Scriptures. In the Eucharist, we still meet Christ in the flesh, in a different way. We are not even wholly cut off from His life in the flesh: “His earthly life possesses the eternal contemporaneousness,” for “becoming a Christian in truth comes to mean to become contemporary with Christ.”³⁵ Though we live in the night, we are not abandoned; though we live in the night, we are not lampless. Still we can meet Christ; still we live with Him. The Apostles and those who beheld Him in the flesh, in His earthly life, had a unique blessing, but we can still be their companions. So the collect of the Office prays:

Lord Jesus, Who, from heaven, by ineffable heavenly deigning, were seen on earth, and conversed with men, make us be the consorts of those who are decorated in Your friendship, and who merited to behold You present upon earth, so that, venerating You in them and them because of You, with an affection of singular piety, we might join with both You and them, with a sense of special charity, and in a singular joining, in the heavens. Who live and reign . . .³⁶

As we do not behold Christ in the flesh, so will we probably never pray this Office in the flesh. In the same volume in which it appeared, there is a calendar of the Oratory’s feasts, and it is not listed there; perhaps it has never even been celebrated. Perhaps it is simply a skeletal text that never received the liturgy’s flesh; yet, even if so, it can point us, with its skeletal finger, to the glory we yearn to behold: the glory of the flesh of Christ.