Meditations for Advent 2024 - Day 12 - Jesus the Christ, the Anointed One & the Virtues of the Anointing of a Christian

Discover the profound significance of Christ's anointing and how it shapes our spiritual journey during this Advent season. Inspired by the teachings of Bishop Jacques Bossuet, we explore the divine roles of priest, prophet, and king that Jesus exemplifies through the Holy Ghost's sacred anointing. This episode invites you to reflect on how this anointing empowers each of us as Christians to embody royal courage, spiritual sacrifice, and a heavenly perspective, living by eternal truths rather than earthly desires. The call to gentleness, as taught by Jesus, serves as a guiding virtue to navigate the challenges of our daily lives with grace and humility.

Chapters

• 0:02 Advent Meditations on Christ's Anointing
• 18:18 Advent Reflections & Gratitude

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Sancte. Sancte, amare morti necranas nos In teis vera vera. Good morning everyone, and welcome to day 12 of Advent and our Advent meditations from Bishop Jacques Bosway. From Bishop Jacques Bosway. So we are on day 12, which is halfway through our Advent this year in 2024. So we will be halfway through our meditations after today. So let's get into it. We'll start with our prayer, like usual, and then we have two meditations today to get through. So let me throw up an image on screen here and we will get going.

Speaker 1: 1:17

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, jesus, my Savior, true God and true man and the true Christ, promised to the patriarchs and the prophets from the beginning of the world and, in time, faithfully bestowed to the holy people you have chosen. You have said by your holy and divine mouth this is eternal life. That they know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. Believing in these words and with the help of thy grace, I wish to be attentive to the task of knowing God and knowing you. So do I draw as near to you as I can, with a lively faith, to know God in you and by you, and to know him in a manner worthy of God, that is, in a manner that leads me to love and to obey him, in accord with the words of your beloved disciple. He who says I know him but disobeys his commandments is a liar, as well as your very own. He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. To know you well, o my God and dear Savior, I wish always, with the help of your grace, to contemplate you in all that befalls you and in all of your mysteries, and, at the same time, to know your Father, who gave you to us, and the Holy Ghost that you both have sent to us. So do I wish to love you with true faith, a faith working through love. Amen, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Speaker 1: 2:53

Meditation 19. Jesus Christ, the Anointed One. O Christ, o Messiah, you whom we hoped for and who were given to us with the sacred name signifying the anointed one of the Lord, help us to see the origins of Christianity and the excellence of your anointing. It is written that the anointing will teach you all things, and again we have the anointing and we know all things. What does it teach us. And again, we have the anointing and we know all things. What does it teach us, unless it is that the anointing that made you the Christ also made us Christians, by the communication of so lovely a name, o Christ, you are known from all time according to this beautiful name. When the psalmist saw you, he heard this name, for he sang your throne, o God, is eternal, and your God has anointed you with oil. It is you that Solomon praised, saying in his divine canticle your name is an oil, a balm that is poured out. When the angel, st Gabriel, announced the time of your coming, he explained himself by saying that the Holy of Holies will be anointed and that the anointed one, that is, the Christ, will be sacrificed. Daniel 9, 21-26. And what did you yourself preach in the synagogue when you explained your mission? What did you preach? But that beautiful text of Isaiah the Spirit of the Lord has sent me and it is for this that he anointed me. Jesus is anointed by the Holy Ghost, not by the material oil that anointed Aaron and the priests Elijah and the prophets David and the kings, although priest, prophet and king, jesus was not anointed with this anointing. Indeed, it was but the shadow of his own. Thus, david said that he was anointed with an excellent oil. Above all those that are said to be anointed, what David points to is the anointing with divinity and the Holy Ghost by which God made him the Christ, and with the same spirit he filled his newborn church and spread the name Christian throughout the whole world.

Speaker 1: 5:23

Yet we must not stop with the acknowledgement of this doctrine. Although it is divine and necessary, we must apply it in the way that God commands us to. By his anointing, jesus Christ is priest, prophet and king. It is in this way that he is the Christ, and it is in the same manner that we are Christians, for by the generous outpouring of his anointing, we are made kings and we are able to offer sacrifice, a royal priesthood. As St Peter says, and as St John says in the book of Revelation, jesus Christ has made us kings in the priests of God, his Father.

Speaker 1: 6:04

We must, then, have a truly royal courage, not allowing ourselves to be subjected in any way to our passions. We must have only the loftiest of thoughts, not allowing ourselves to be enslaved by earthly ones. As kings, let us be magnanimous and tremendously generous. Let us aspire to the noblest deeds, but let us aspire to them as priests who offer spiritual sacrifices to the most holy Christians. We are no longer men of the world. We are those to whom it has been said you shall be holy, for I am holy. 1 Peter 1.16.

Speaker 1: 6:47

In what way are we prophets? Let us act by a heavenly instinct. Let us leave the walls of this present world and let us be filled with the things that are to come. We should breathe only eternity, but you are making a home for yourself upon the earth. You wish to rise in stature here. Dream instead of a land in which you shall be a king. Fear not little flock, for it is your father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Speaker 1: 7:18

Luke 12, 32. Meditation 20 the Virtues of the Anointing of a Christian. One of the principal effects of the Christian faith and of the holy anointing of the children of God is gentleness. Learn from me, said Jesus himself, for I am gentle and lowly in heart. Matthew 11, 29.

Speaker 1: 7:48

Isaiah predicted his gentleness in these words that St Matthew later applied to Christ. Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights. I have put my spirit upon him. He will bring forth justice to the nations. Here is a most extraordinary servant, who will not cry or lift up his voice as the contentious and the disputatious do. How gentle he is and how humble. A bruised reed he will not break and a dimly burning wick he will not quench. Here is the Spirit of Jesus Christ and the true Spirit of God, which was not in the great and strong wind that rent the mountains, as Elijah, wishing him to exterminate and destroy all things, seemed to think, nor was he in the earthquake or the fire, but instead in the gentle breeze, in the light and refreshing air of the still small voice. 1 Kings 19, 11-12.

Speaker 1: 8:57

Such is the spirit of the Lord Jesus. This is why, when his disciples wished, in the spirit of Elijah and Elisha, to call down fire from heaven upon the villages that refused to welcome them, he said to them in his ineffable gentleness you do not know what manner of spirit you are? Of Luke 9, 55. This was to say, you do not know the spirit of your religion and of the doctrine of Christ. Such was his gentleness that he said to those who struck him if I have spoken wrongly, bear witness to the wrong, but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me, john, 18, 23. Why do you strike me, john 18.23. And elsewhere. O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me that I may heal him. Mark 9.19, luke 9, 41 and again, women, where are they? Has no one condemned you. Neither do I condemn you. John 8, 10 through 11.

Speaker 1: 10:14

Let us then put on a spirit of gentleness, the true spirit of the Christian faith. May the anointing of the Holy Ghost sweeten our bitterness and soften our pride. Let not our speech be haughty and disdainful, for it is weakness that causes us to act that way. Strength lies in calm reasoning. It is absent when one is reduced to contentiousness in order to support a bad argument. When you must fight for the truth, consider that it was not at all by bitter disputes that the gospel was established, but by gentleness and patience, by imitating Jesus Christ, who was like a sheep that, before its shearers, is dumb. Isaiah 53.7.

Speaker 1: 11:04

Listen to the preachers of his gospel when they were condemned by the Jews. Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard Acts 4, 19-20. It is in this spirit that one must speak to those whom the truth obliges us to oppose. It is in this way, without disputatiousness or vexation, that they are shown to be in the wrong. These are the actions of true Christians and true imitators of Christ. Let us again listen to the same part of the Acts of the Apostles and hear the innocent flock so unjustly mistreated. Sovereign Lord, who didst make the heaven and the earth, look upon their threats and grant to thy servants to speak thy word with all boldness, while thou stretchest out thy hand to heal and signs and wonders are performed through the name of thy holy servant, jesus. Acts 4.24 and 29-30. Thus they spoke with confidence and without either discouragement or bitterness. He who places his confidence in God does not place it in the violence of a bitter and imperious tone.

Speaker 1: 12:29

Victory belongs to gentleness and patience. And Isaiah, having shown Jesus Christ to be so humble, so patient and so gentle, concludes by saying he will not fail or be discouraged till he brings justice to victory, and in his name will the Gentiles hope. So you must go about God's business with gentleness. Be true Christians, that is to say true lambs, and without murmur, without noise, without any tincture of the spirit of contradiction. Show as much tranquility as you do innocence. Lay hold of gentleness and of patience, her daughter. These two virtues are the proper characteristics of Christian piety when the fruits of the anointing of Jesus Christ poured out upon us.

Speaker 1: 13:26

And those are our meditations for today. So there are 40 total meditations. We just finished meditation 20. Finished meditation 20. So we are halfway through, uh, the 40 meditations and halfway through the days of advent this year. So we are, we are getting there, everyone.

Speaker 1: 13:54

Excuse me, I apologize, I am definitely coming down with something and, uh, I've tried to cut out the worst parts of me coughing uh, sneezing, whatnot, but, uh, I'm sure there will be some of that. That makes it into the final edit, unfortunately, so I apologize, but hopefully that doesn't last more than a day or two here, um, yeah, so this, this last meditation on the virtues of the anointing of a christian, um, definitely convicts me to to do better, um, in terms of speaking and acting with gentleness, especially online, more than anything in person and face to face, because I'm self-legmatic, I'm pretty gentle and not contentious in person, because I hate dealing with conflict in person. But online, my, my melancholic side definitely comes out and, um, especially on Twitter. Uh, I do not act with the gentleness that a Christian should most of the time, so I will definitely be working on that. You know, especially because this isn't a boomer priest, you know, from the 60s or 70s. Saying this, no offense to any potential boomers listening, but priests of that generation have a reputation, as I'm sure you know as well or better than most right, but you know so.

Speaker 1: 15:42

This isn't a post-council priest or a council raised in the new springtime, know, prior to the Enlightenment, telling us this you know this man and everyone back then lived far harder lives than us. They were far harder people. People. They had to deal with things that we couldn't even dream of in terms of disease and death. You know, just think of infant mortality back then. Most of the people back then had far more children than us. You know six, seven living children and probably twice. You know six, seven living children and probably twice. You know that that was probably 50% of the children they conceived. And we're not just talking miscarriages, we're talking, you know, 30, 40% of infants dying in that first year. Can you imagine watching so many of your own children die as as as infants? I can't even imagine that, right.

Speaker 1: 17:07

So these people were hard and strong in a way we can't imagine, and Bishop Bassois is still telling them to put on a spirit of gentleness, and that that's the true spirit of the Christian faith. And you know they probably needed that, to hear that, more than than a lot of us do. You know, uh, for for our, for our time, for our generations, we probably need the opposite. You know we, uh, a lot of us probably, can be too gentle about certain things, about sin. You always hear do not judge, and that's taken completely out of context and used improperly. A lot of people could probably stand to judge the sinful actions of others more, but there are definitely some and, like I said, I am one where I do need to learn to be more gentle, especially at certain times and places.

Speaker 1: 18:18

So this is one meditation I will definitely be attempting to work on throughout the day and throughout the rest of Advent. But thank you all for listening. I appreciate it. I hope. Well, first off, I hope this recording is working, um, since the one a few days ago did it. But, uh, well, please work, uh, but I will see you all tomorrow and we will continue through the second half of our Advent season. Thanks, everyone, have a great day. Thank you.