News of the thirty-three year Visit of the Son of God amongst us at and about the city of Jerusalem in a region of the earth known as the Middle East more than two thousand years ago was not going to propagate itself. It took place in the boondocks of time and space. The thirty-three year Visit was inconspicuous, anonymous and remote. The Romans executed by crucifixion hundreds and hundreds of thousand. We cannot identify even one of the victims of Roman crucifixion. Why would the name of the Nazarene stand out from the other victims?
At Bethlehem, the most Holy Trinity delivered to us a love note. God put a love note into our hands. Imagine that! Thirty-three years later, at Calvary, the Son of God personally guaranteed that the love note was genuine. We put the Son of God to the test(Matthew 4:7). We tortured and killed the Son of God while He was human, alive, tender, and vulnerable. If the love note were counterfeit, it would have faded as we tortured Him and died when we killed Him. But it did not. Both He and His love for us survived. His survival is the proof of His omnipotence. The survival of His love for us is the proof of so much more than omnipotence. The survival of His love for us is proof that the essence of divinity is indestructible love for us.
The thirty-three Visit was an apocalypse that revealed the sweetness of paradise to us. The indestructible love of God for us is honey for the bees. It pulls the children of Adam and Eve through the door of paradise. The thirty-three year Visit is the good news of great joy. God was here! God was here! Rejoice! God paid us a visit! The Son of God honored us with a visit. He stayed in our house. He rubbed elbows with us.
But there was a problem.
How would news of the thirty-three year visit get from then and there in the past to us here and now in the present? The problem was propagation.
God concluded that, to propagate the good news of great joy, some sort of a perpetual memorial commemorating the thirty-three year Visit was urgently needed (and a Church to tend it).
God did not want to establish an ordinary, conventional, run-of-the-mill memorial. God did not want a firefly; they wanted a fire - a blazing, raging, engaging bonfire to match the bonfire of love for us that burns in their most sacred heart. They wanted to establish a memorial as real, as extraordinary, and as abundantly alive as the star that rose at Bethlehem, set at Calvary and then rose triumphantly again. Any inferior memorial of the thirty-three Visit just would not do.
The most Holy Trinity reviewed the candidates for a memorial - words, a reenactment, a work of art, and other types of representations. It would be too cruel to ask the Son of God to let us impale Him on the Cross - to repeat His sacrifice at Calvary anew - for each successive generation and, within a generation, from place to place (Luke 16:19-31). One Calvary - one guarantee of His love for us - was enough. Duplicate guarantees would be superfluous. From their review of the candidates for a memorial, God realized that the any representations made by human hands of the thirty-three year Visit would be inferior to the thirty-three year Visit itself. Therefore, God decided that the memorial had to be nothing less than the thirty-three year Visit itself. So God did the impossible - they created a time machine. They uprooted the thirty-three Visit of the Son of God to us upon the earth from its foundation in time and space, made it portable and created a vehicle to carry it to us in the present. The vehicle that carries the Visit of the Son of God to us is the Mass. At Mass, the physics of time and space are suspended to publish and make known to us here and now the fact that the Son of God paid us a visit at an about the city of Jerusalem in a region of the earth called the Middle East more than two thousand years ago. [For lessons of the Visit, see the post entitled, 'The Owner of the House is Back']