Dedication of the Knights of Columbus Incarnation Dome
Homily by Most Rev. Donald W. Wuerl, S.T.D.
Archbishop of Washington
Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
17 November 2007
 |
| Archbishop Donald Wuerl |
Today as we come together in this great Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, we do so in order to bless and dedicate the truly magnificent work of art depicting God coming into our lives in what is so splendidly portrayed in the Knights of Columbus Incarnation Dome.
The Knights of Columbus are represented in this Basilica today by our Supreme Knight, Carl Anderson. In recognizing and expressing our appreciation to him, we also renew, in the name of the Basilica and its board of directors and on behalf of the Catholic faithful throughout this country and the world who have come to love Mary’s house, our profound gratitude to the nearly two million member order worldwide of the Knights of Columbus.
As a young student many, many years ago, I witnessed the blessing of the great Knights of Columbus bell tower that continues to be a unique symbol of Catholic faith and devotion in this, our nation’s capital. Over the intervening years, the Knights of Columbus’ involvement in this Basilica has been consistently strong, reverently devout and effectively caring.
The Knights of Columbus Incarnation Dome is an extraordinary gift that bears testimony, not only to the generosity of the Knights, but to their enduring devotion to Our Lady and to her house here in Washington that is our National Shrine in her honor.
Standing nearly 100 feet above the floors of this extraordinary Basilica is a work of art composed of approximately 2.5 million tiles of colored glass.
The dome has been transformed from plain gray to a mosaic composed of every imaginable shade of an equal range of colors. What we see is an attempt to depict in the great tradition of the artistic heritage of the Church the Church’s faith in her experience of God with us – Emmanuel.
The Gospels speak with a sublime simplicity of the events surrounding the conception and birth of Jesus. Both Matthew and Luke open their Gospels with the story of God choosing to come among us as one of us. The coming of Christ was quiet and gentle.
He who came to all as Lord, Savior, Mighty Counselor and God of Majesty came among the poorest and the little. In view of the greatness of the divine promise, the circumstances of his coming seemed most unlikely. His mother was, in earthly estimation, an unimportant figure, as was also her husband, Joseph the carpenter.
When we look to the scene of the Annunciation, we find the angel Gabriel sent by God to this humble daughter of Israel, Mary. And she was told: “Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Lk 1:31-33).
Only great faith could have accepted such a promise in calm confidence. Only in faith was hope sustained in the utter poverty of Jesus’ birth. Away from her home at Nazareth, at the royal city of Bethlehem, Mary “gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn” (Lk 2:6-7). But in all its poverty, this first Christmas was an event of supreme joy. On that day the Lord of glory appeared as our brother.
In glittering mosaic, the scene in the Incarnation dome celebrates the most remarkable moment in human history. Two thousand years ago in Bethlehem of Judea heaven and earth met. On the first Christmas Day, God came among us in the person of Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God with us. Nothing in human history is more exciting than this truth and no one has so changed history as has the infant son of Mary who is also the Son of God.
Somehow this truth is almost overwhelmed by our very familiarity with it. We have all grown up with Christmas and perhaps because we have given so much attention to its celebration, we may not fully understand and appreciate the meaning and power of its message. And yet the splendor of this visual representation of the birth of Jesus focuses for us once again our attention on the very heart of our claim to draw close to God. The Virgin Mary brought forth a Son who was both God’s Son and one of us. Never again would we need to feel distant from a transcendent, invisible, infinite and spiritual divinity. As a poet once exclaimed, Mary is our freedom from an abstract deity.
The faith of the Catholic Church in Jesus Christ is summed up in the simple statement that he is God and man. Jesus, the Son of Mary, is also the Son of God. In theological terms we call this reality the Incarnation. In liturgical and popular terms we speak of Christmas – Emmanuel – God with us.
To understand what happened in the Incarnation, we have to go all the way back to the beginning. In Genesis we read how God created us in friendship with himself so that we might enjoy life on this earth and someday be united in eternal happiness with God. All of this we ruined by sin.
Only God could restore the harmony between the created world and its loving Creator. Only the power of God could heal so great a wound. And yet God chose that the healing would involve the very creatures who rebelled. Thus in God’s plan God would come among us, become one of us, and effect the healing in a way that combined both the power of God and the weakness of human nature.
Mary’s role in all of this is essential, because God’s Eternal Word would enter the world by taking on human nature through the very flesh and blood of Mary. It would be this human body fashioned from Mary that would suffer and die, rise from the dead and thus win salvation for us. In order that this might happen, Jesus had to be truly man and truly God.
Even before her son was born, Elizabeth called her “the mother of my Lord.” As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “the One whom she conceived as man by the Holy Spirit, who truly became her Son according to the flesh, was none other than the Father’s eternal Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity. Hence the Church confesses that Mary is truly ‘Mother of God’ (Theotoko s)” (495).
Mary is the model of what our faith should be. Like us, Mary was a human being who had to struggle to hear and accept God’s word and to grasp the mysterious ways in which God works. She did so with such consummate fidelity that she is forever the example of what we mean by faith – true, profound faith.
We cannot equal Mary in the wondrous mysteries in which she participated and in the privileges she received. But we can certainly emulate her faith.
The liturgy speaks of our seeing and loving in Jesus a God we could not otherwise see. “In him we see our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see” (Christmas Preface). The God we see and love is truly manifest in the person of Jesus Christ, one of us, united with God in such a unique manner as to be “God with us.”
The sublime truth that Jesus is one person, though he is both God and man, reveals how great is the generosity of God in the act of Incarnation by which the Eternal Word humbles himself to become one of us.
This message lies at the heart of the good news of our faith. He who is almighty, the eternal Lord of all, whose unseen might and mercy sustain all things, in the words of Saint Augustine, “stepped into the tide of the years,” and in the words of Saint John, “lived among us,” in the visible humanity he had made his own.
This splendid Knights of Columbus Incarnation Dome reminds us of even more. The infant Jesus, the child of Mary, grew up. At a certain point he came among us now as the wisdom of God – teacher and guide. The Gospel tells us that at a certain point Jesus began to announce that the Kingdom of God was at hand.
The first of Jesus’ miracles was worked at Cana, a small village not far from where Jesus was raised. While he was attending a wedding reception with his disciples and his mother, the wine ran out. At Mary’s request, Jesus changed ordinary water, six large stone jars of it, into wine (cf. Jn 2:1-11). It was the first of many signs. Jesus would continue to show his divine power over the elements of nature, sickness and the frailty of the human body as well as possession by demons.
The purpose of Jesus’ miracles was to draw people’s attention to his message. To give credence to his proclamation, Jesus healed the sick, raised the dead, drove out evil spirits, calmed storms and worked a host of other wonders. The gospels abound with stories of the blind seeing, the lame walking and the bread and fish multiplied to feed thousands. Interspersed through all of this ministry is the teaching of Jesus that the kingdom of God is at hand.
Finally in the glittering glass of the mosaic, we see the assurance to the Apostles and to us that the incredible vision of a kingdom of God coming to be in and through each of us in and through the church Is worthy of our faith. In the Transfiguration Jesus says to us be not afraid. Just as I have come from the Father and the Father’s kingdom is at work in me, so you have been sent forth by me and the kingdom is at work in you. In the Transfiguration we see something of the glory of God shining through the human nature of Christ. So, too, is the world to see something of the glory of God shining through us through his new body the Church. Every time we enter this Basilica and bask in the beauty of the Knights of Columbus Incarnation Dome we are also challenged to remember that the work of Jesus is to be carried on and completed in you and me.
As wondrous as is the mystery of the Incarnation that God would come among us, equally wondrous is the mystery of God at work in his Church, his kingdom coming to be in each of us. But it is true, it is the faith of the Church.
Aware of the intimate bond between the Kingdom of God on earth and the Church, we can see in the Transfiguration a sign of what we are capable of accomplishing – the manifestation of God’s kingdom in our world. Like the reign of God, the kingdom is spiritual and will be perfected in the last days. It is not a political kingdom: “my kingdom does not belong to this world” (Jn 18:36). Yet Christ’s kingdom is planted in this world. Christ shows it to us as something unique, a community called together by him and of which he is the Good Shepherd (cf. Jn 10.11-16). God rules in the midst of his people.
The Church and the Kingdom of God are not precisely synonymous. But the Church is the realization on earth of God’s kingdom, the final fullness of which is in eternity. Yet the glory of the kingdom is already breaking into our world. Every time we celebrate a sacrament, every time we participate in the Eucharist we reach beyond the limits of this world into the realm of the spirit and the kingdom of God. The Transfiguration simply confirms that this is true.
I will be your God and you will be my people. Thus God spoke to the prophets of old. But in this dome that we bless today we see how God brought to fulfillment the revelation.
In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets: In these last days, he spoke to us through a Son who will be made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe.
What we see in this dome is the story of God coming among us so that we would see him as our God and learn from him how we would be his people. With Mary to intercede for us the vision of our being an active and fruitful part of the manifesting of God’s kingdom can be a reality. May Mary, mother of Jesus, mother of the Incarnate Word, mother of our Savior, mother of our Redeemer, mother of our Lord and our mother intercede for us with her Son so that in all that we say and do it is his kingdom we will manifest and help realize in our lifetime in our world and some day rejoice in its fullness forever in eternity.