Preaching the Mystery of Faith

order to ensure that by reading the Scriptures and celebrating the Eucharist we understand ever more deeply the essential beliefs of the Church. 41 One effective way to do this might be to connect some point of the hom ily to a phrase or key idea of the Creed that will be immediately recited by the assembly when the homily is finished. The Creed has the same center that the Scriptures and the Eucharist have. It is that the “one Lord Jesus Christ . . . suf fered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” But this Jesus is “true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.” The homilist proclaims and teaches that this is the one “who came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” This is the one whom we see moving about, speaking and acting in the Gospels. This is the one who “suffered death and was buried and rose again.” We see here what St. Cyril of Jerusalem meant when, in handing over the Creed to those who would soon be baptized, he explained, “The most important doctrines were collected from the whole of Scripture to make a single exposition of the faith.” 42 So, when all is said and done, why should the homilist preach doctrinally and catechetically? Because, as Paul and the Evangelists knew, the people are drawn to Jesus and his Gospel by the beauty and truth of the mysteries of our faith. The ultimate goal of proclaiming the Gospel is to lead people into a loving and intimate relationship with the Lord, a relationship that forms the character of their persons and guides them in living out their faith. A good homilist, for example, is able to articulate the mystery of the Incarna tion—that the eternal Son of God came to dwell among us as man—in such a manner that his listeners are able to understand more deeply the beauty and truth of this mystery and to see its connections with daily life. By highlighting his humanity, his poverty, his compassion, his forthrightness, and his suffering and Death, an effective homily would show the faithful just how much the Son of God loved them in taking our flesh upon himself. And by expanding the congregation’s love for the humanity of Jesus, the homilist could also move his fellow Christians to a deeper sense of justice, with a sense of com passion for the most vulnerable and the poor and of the broken humanity of 41 The CCC expresses this well (no. 170): “We do not believe in formulas, but in those realities they express, which faith allows us to touch . . . All the same, we do approach these realities with the help of formulations of the faith which permit us to express the faith and to hand it on, to celebrate it in community, to assimilate and live on it more and more.” See also CIC, cc. 760, 767 §1, 768, 769; and CCEO, cc. 614 §1, 616. 42 Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis 5:12, 1.

26