Homily of Father Nichols on "Primiz" Mass of Father Andre Burnham

We are, at this Mass, on a cusp, or boundary, or threshold.  What I have in mind is in the first place the ritual calendar we're using.  We are on the cusp between, on the one hand, the Christmas season, which celebrates the Theophany, the manifestation of God the Word as a human being to other human beings, and, on the other hand, so-called 'Ordinary Time', a time which is far from ordinary because it consists in the telling of his story, the story of the public ministry of the Christ as it unfolds in all its dramatic action.  Appropriately, then, today's Gospel-reading points both backwards and forwards, and its key is the identification of Jesus as the 'Lamb of God'.  Twice, actually, within a few verses of the Fourth Gospel, when the Baptist wants to identify who Jesus is, to locate him (so to say) on the map of salvation geography, these are the words he comes up with.  The best explanation of that, I think, is that John the Baptist is rehearsing what it was his cousin told him.  At the Baptism, the heavens were opened for Jesus, and in the open heavens he saw… well, what did he see? He saw himself as the Lamb, sent by the Father to make the atoning sacrifice which will reconcile to the Father Israel and all the world, and bring humankind home to the Father's house.   Jesus would go on to comport himself in just this fashion in his public ministry, in the strength of the Holy Spirit whose descent on him in the form of a dove verified what it was, in the opened heavens, that he saw. The Lamb of God: that is the One we follow, it is how the God-man wishes to be known and loved.  He came to make sacrifice for us. That is the impetus that drives his ministry forward till it reaches its climax in the Paschal Mystery of his Death and Resurrection.  It is the attitude in which he still stands before the Father, showing the marks of his now glorious wounds.  And it is why the continuing sign of that sacrifice – the Mass – is the true centre of the Christian religion.

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