Sunday Reflection – 20 October – One Name That Lives

Sunday Reflection – 20 October – Twenty Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C and World Mission Sunday

One Name That Lives

By Saint John Henry Newman (1801-1890)

“There is just one Name in the whole world that lives – it is the Name of One who passed His years in obscurity and who died a malefactor’s death.   (Two thousand yeas) have gone by since that time but still It has It’s hold upon the human mind.   It has possessed the world and It maintains possession.   Amid the most various nations, under the most diversified circumstances, in the most cultivated, in the rudest races and intellects, in all classes of society, the Owner of that great Name reigns.   High and low, rich and poor, acknowledge Him.   Millions of souls are conversing with Him, are venturing at His word, are looking for His presence.

Palaces, sumptuous, innumerable, are raised to His honour.   His image, in it’s deepest humiliations, is triumphantly displayed in the proud city, in the open country, at the corners of streets, on the tops of mountains.   It sanctifies the ancestral hall, the closet and the bedchamber, it is the subject for the exercise of the highest genius in the imitative arts.   It is worn next to the heart in life, it is held before the failing eyes in death.

Here, then, is One who is not mere name, He is no empty fiction, He is substance, He is dead and gone but still He lives – as the living, energetic, thought of successive generations and as the awful motive power of a thousand great events ….

O my own Saviour, now in the tomb but soon to arise, You have paid the price – it is done – consummatum est – it is secured.

O fulfil Your Resurrection in us and as You have purchased us, claim us, take possession of us, make us Thine.”

Amen

Holy God, we praise Thy Name!