The Holy Family
January 10, 2021
The Nativity, Antoniazzo Romano; late 15th century
A Sermon on the Feast of the Holy Family,* Jan. 10, 2021
Heaven, or Hell on Earth?
Everyone needs a place to call home and a family to love. Everyone looks for his place in the world, something to hold on to, something to give meaning to his life, especially in times of trouble and insecurity. At such times we need to turn to God. God is always there. But in fact, most human beings are homeless persons, in the sense that they do not know God. They are desperately seeking, because in not knowing God they have lost the very meaning and purpose of their existence. They are sheep without a shepherd, because they do not know their true Shepherd, Jesus Christ.
Our true home is with God, as the psalms declare:
“How lovely is your dwelling place, O lord of hosts! My soul yearns and pines for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest in which she puts her young – your altars, O lord of hosts, my king and my God! Happy are they who dwell in your house!” (Ps.83:2-5).
The Holy Family – Jesus, Mary, and Joseph – help us to understand our destiny, which is Heaven, where we shall know God and love God forever. The essence of Heaven is knowing God as He is, which the Church calls the Beatific Vision.
“Beloved,” says St. John, “now we are called the children of God; and it has not yet appeared what we shall be. We know that, when he appears, we shall be like to him, for we shall see him just as he is” (1Jn.3:2).
Those who knew Jesus Christ, His Holy Mother Mary and St. Joseph, were close to Heaven without knowing it, since the Holy Family was Heaven on earth. But in this world there is always a certain distance, even in the closest of relationships. It will not be so in Heaven. In Heaven, besides knowing God, we shall also know and love everyone else there. Our closeness to them on the spiritual plane will be far greater than anything that we could possibly know on earth.
To be without God is the greatest of human tragedies. The essence of Hell is separation from God. Hell is homelessness, loneliness, hopelessness. Having lost God, and everyone else as a result, one has no place, no home, for all eternity.
Unlike the optimistic promoters of the New Theology, like John Paul II, who taught that no one goes to Hell, if, indeed, it even exists, Our Lord spoke about Hell on many occasions. Those who work iniquity, He said, will be cast “into the furnace of fire, where there will be the weeping, and the gnashing of teeth” (Mt.13:42).
At the end of the world the Son of Man (Jesus) will say to those on His left hand (unrepentant sinners):
“Depart from me, accursed ones, into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels” (Mt.25:41).
But there is such a thing as “hell on earth.” The “New World Order,” which is far from the paradise promised by the secular humanist utopians like Bill Gates, has now taken over our governmental institutions, nullified our laws, and turned us into beggars, useless eaters to be executed if unwilling to cooperate, or just “terminated” when we are no longer useful. It will be a “hell on earth” for true Christians. Everything will be allowed except to serve Jesus Christ in His Holy Catholic Church. Most of our Church institutions have already been taken over. Catholics everywhere are wandering in the church of darkness. The latest blow came with the phony election results.
The New World Order we hear about is actually the City of Man, the devil’s stronghold, which is crumbling to dust and passing away. The true New World Order was established by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper when He gave His Apostles the Chalice of His Blood, saying, “This is the cup of my blood of the new and eternal covenant, the mystery of faith, which shall be shed for you and for many unto the forgiveness of sins.”
The true “civilization of love” is the New Covenant, outside of which there is only disorder, which is the fruit of Original Sin.
St. Paul speaks clearly of God’s New World Order through the restoration of all things in Christ:
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… In him we have redemption through his blood, the remission of sins, according to the riches of his grace. This grace has abounded beyond measure in us in all wisdom and prudence, so that he may make known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure. And this his good pleasure he purposed in him to be dispensed in the fullness of the times: to re-establish all things in Christ, both those in the heavens and those on the earth” (Eph.1:3;7-10).
“Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit that is from God, that we may know the things that have been given us by God. These things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in the learning of the Spirit, combining spiritual with spiritual. But the sensual man does not perceive the things that are of the Spirit of God, for it is foolishness to him and he cannot understand, because it is examined spiritually. But the spiritual man judges all things, and he himself is judged by no man. For ‘who has known the mind of the Lord, that he might instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ” (1Cor.2:13-16).
The New World Church has given up judging according to the Spirit, and it allows itself to be guided by the world. Bergoglio speaks piously about human solidarity and the brotherhood of man. But our solidarity is with Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and with all who are signed with the seal of the Living God through Baptism. We are fed with the True Bread from Heaven, the Body and Blood of Christ. Here is the true “civilization of peace and love” in which the unbelieving world can have no place.
(*The author of this sermon prefers to remain anonymous.)
