“For you know the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”

          Christ invites us today to encounter His poverty, but this poverty is not necessarily the poverty you might expect. Of course, we know that He is particularly close to the poor, to those who are living in the material circumstances of poverty. When we draw close to the poor, when we answer the call of the Gospel generously to serve our brothers in sisters in need, we draw close to Christ.

          And while St. Paul is urging the Christian at Corinth to do just that for the Christians in Jerusalem who were suffering the material circumstances of poverty, he motivates them to do so by the consideration of a much deeper, existential poverty that Christ experienced for us in the Incarnation. By the Incarnation of the Son of God – the fact that the second person of the Most Holy Trinity, the Most High God Himself, took on our human nature – an even greater and more beautiful poverty entered the world for the first time.

          After all, we are not actually called to eliminate poverty, because Christ calls us to be poor ourselves. We are called to alleviate indigence – the state of lacking the necessities of life. Christ calls us to do so because of the dignity of human nature – “the image of his own nature he made him,” we read in the Book of Wisdom today. Indigence – lacking the material necessities of life – creates an incongruity (a lack of agreement) between the dignity of men and women and the indignity of not having what is needed to sustain the great good of human life. (So, I’m not at all belittling service to the poor! It is an essential part of the Christian life. We’re just noting as an important step here, that there is so much more to the idea of “poverty” to which the Gospel wants to open our minds and hearts.)

          If there is something wrong, then, about a person with infinity dignity, made in the image and likeness of God, who lacks the material necessities of life, how much more is there an incongruity between the infinite and all-powerful God, in the person of Jesus Christ, taking on our poor human nature? This is what St. Paul means when he tells us that Christ, who was rich, became poor. It is not that the Holy Family was poor, or that they lacked the material necessities for life. Most likely, they were working class people at a time when life was difficult. Their life would seem to us soft modern men and women arduous and yes, poor. But the real poverty experienced by the Son of God is not material poverty – it is the poverty of being God, and yet being like you and me.

          Christ experiences the poverty of our nature, “so that by his poverty you might become rich,” or, as the Church Fathers put it, in the Incarnation, God became man, so that man might become God. This great goal of the Christian life is often forgotten. We are not only striving to become holy enough – to make it over the finish line into Purgatory, and then eventually into Heaven. We are striving to become saints, and the saints shine with the very glory of God Himself – we can be so bold as to say that they have been divinized. The goal of your life is to become more fully what you already are – the image of God Himself.

          Christ’s invitation to us today, then, is to be like the woman who sneaks up and touches the hem of His garment, who encounters His poverty. Where does this happen? Of course, as we said at the beginning, it happens whenever we encounter the poor – those experiencing the material conditions of indigence, and those living through the spiritual poverties of suffering, isolation, discrimination, or sadness. But regardless of whether or not our paths cross those who experience Christ’s poverty in these was, there is a way in which every Christian is called to enter the poverty of Christ’s human nature at least once a week: in the lived experience of the Sacred Liturgy.

          By “Sacred Liturgy,” we refer to the entirety of the Church’s worship. This is primarily the Holy Mass, but also includes the celebration of the other sacraments as well as all of the Church’s public prayer – when priests, religious, or laity recite the Divine Office together, when a priest or deacon blesses the homes of the faithful, or any other official act of public prayer. In all of these rites, but most especially in the celebration of the Eucharist, in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, we are invited to enter into the poverty of Christ’s Incarnation.

          When Holy Mass is celebrated according to the mind of Holy Mother Church, we are invited into an encounter with mystery, with something beyond ourselves that infinitely surpasses human comprehension. There will inevitably be gestures and actions whose meaning we do not recognize. There will be words we do not understand – maybe words in our own language, since the language of public worship ought to use an elevated style that shows forth God’s dignity and majesty – or maybe words in a sacred language, following a universal human instinct found in cultures all over the world that recognizes the need for a speech in divine worship different than our everyday speech and connects us to those who have worshipped the same God in the same rites throughout the centuries.

          Of course, it is good for us to learn more about what happens at Holy Mass, to understand more fully the sacred rites and thus enter into them more profoundly. But Holy Mother Church has been wise over the centuries to preserve certain prayers in silence, and to encourage the use of elevated language and even a sacred tongue, because when we have that frustrating experience of not quite understanding what is going on, we encounter the poverty of our own understanding, and thus we touch the saving poverty of Christ.

          Sometimes this happens in beautiful and profound ways, with beautiful sacred music, or elaborate ritual gestures. And sometimes it happens in more mundane ways. We could not understand what is going on because the priest mumbles or talks too fast (though by the way, most of the time we’re talking to God rather than to you), because your hearing aids are malfunctioning, because your child’s diaper needs changed, because the person in front of you is driving you nuts, or whatever other reason.

Whether it’s something profound, or something more mundane – when you do not understand, when your experience of Mass is not what you think it ought to be, what you so desperately wish it would be, remember that you are being invited to experience the poverty of Christ. In those moments, you reach out and touch Him, and power goes out to transform the poverty of your prayer into an invisible, but life-changing encounter with His grace. Whether you feel it or not, this mysterious encounter will make you truly rich.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

XIII Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV