Sunday, April 9 : Saint Maximus of Turin

Today, as yesterday, let our joy break out, my brethren. If night’s darkness has interrupted our rejoicing then the holy day is not complete… for the brightness shed by the joy of the Lord is eternal. Christ shone upon us yesterday and today his light shines out again. “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday and today” says the blessed apostle Paul (Heb 13,8). Yes, Christ has become our day. He was born today for us, as God his Father declares through the voice of David: “You are my son; today I have become your father” (Ps 2,7). What are we to say? That he did not once father his son but himself engendered day and night… Yes, Christ is our ‘today’: living splendor that never sets, he does not cease to set alight the world he sustains (cf. Heb 1,3) and this eternal refulgence seems but a day. “A thousand years in your sight are like a single day” exclaims the prophet (Ps 90[89],4). Yes, Christ is that single day because God’s eternity is single. He is our today: the past, once gone, does not pass him by; the future, as yet unknown, holds no secrets for him. Sovereign Light, he embraces all things, knows all things, at all times he is present and possesses them all. Before him the past cannot dissolve nor the future hide… This day is neither the one when he was born of the Virgin Mary according to the flesh nor the one when he came forth from the mouth of God his Father according to his divinity, but it is the moment when he was raised from the dead. “He raised up Jesus,” says the apostle Paul, “as it is written in the second Psalm: ‘You are my son; this day I have begotten you” (Acts 13,33). How truly he is our day when, springing up from hell’s thick darkness, he sets mankind alight. How truly he is our day, this man whom the dark designs of his foes could not blacken. No better day than this could have welcomed the light: both day and life it has restored to all the dead. Old age had laid men out in death; he has raised them up again in the renewed vigor of his today.
Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team