Mysterious Preparation for the Gospel Here

This is a computer-generated transcription that has been included to make the homily searchable.  It has not been verified by the author. 

“He preached good news to the people.” Today in Advent, we have Saint John the Baptist with this mission to prepare people for the decisive coming of the Savior. And in this time of today, on this feast of Gaudete, and this time of Advent, it reminds us of the person who did more than anybody else to prepare for the coming of the Lord, which is our Blessed Mother. And not just did prepare but continues throughout history to prepare us for the coming of the Lord. And just a few days ago we had precisely the celebration of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And which is so important, the Lord has made it very clear how important it is to our little mission. And it was, it was precisely on this on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, eight years ago when Sister received her first message and then our Lord has told us that He wants to do here, a new Tepeyac, that was the name of the hillside where our Blessed Mother appeared. And so making it very clear how much what He wants to do here is related to her apparitions at Our Lady of Guadalupe. And so that’s an important event, a very important event for us. And in one thing, it reminds us that it’s not an event that happened in a fairy tale, but it happened in our real world. It’s a real event. When you read the account, it almost sounds like a fairy tale, because it’s so amazing, but it happened in our world. And so I wanted, there’s a point I want to, I won’t tell the whole story. A lot of us are very familiar with it, but just recently, there’s been a new book that has shed a new light on the what happened, and that great apparition. The book is called, and I reference this book in the podcast – some of you might have seen that the book is called “Guadalupe and the Flower World Prophecy” – “Guadalupe and the Flower World Prophecy.” And the subtitle is “How God prepared the Americas for conversion before the Lady appeared.” And so it’s by a married couple, Joseph Julian and Monique Gonzalez, and it’s been endorsed by Archbishop Corderoni and other bishops and Father Charles Muir and a number of others. So as I say, this book sheds a new light, because the situation that the Spanish missionaries encountered was extremely difficult there. They were trying hard, but there had been very few conversions and to such a point that the missionaries were on the verge of quitting. They were so discouraged about how difficult and how little results there were. One thing is that they had difficulty communicating in the native language, and they even had more difficulty understanding the culture because it was such a different culture from theirs. And the bishop, in fact, the Bishop Sumaraga of Mexico City, had written to Rome to report, and this is striking, that the natives seem unusually resistant to the gospel. Remember that. So he’s saying that their experience has been that the natives seem unusually resistant to the Gospel. And one thing in their culture, they were very, it was a very traditional culture. For them, new meant bad. It’s very different from, you know, United States, where everything is, you know, when you’re selling anything, you say new, new, new. Well, for them it was the opposite; new meant bad. And so what this seemed like to them, it was very new what the Spaniards were bringing. And so there’s, there’s been a great question that has puzzled a lot of people, because after the apparition, great numbers came, even from very far away, even people who had never seen the image yet, never seen the image, yet were suddenly coming. A lot of these people who are coming hadn’t met any of the friars, and yet now they were pleading for baptism. They were bringing their idols to be burned. They were regularizing their marriages. And so this, people that have been so resistant, unusually resistant to the message, suddenly were coming. Again, even people who hadn’t seen the image yet, hadn’t heard the friars, hadn’t met the friars, were suddenly coming from great distances. And so the question is, what happened? What caused the reaction? And so this is where I think this book sheds a lot of new light, because there was a lot of brutal aspects of the Aztec culture, like human sacrifice, but also there were signs of a deep longing for something greater, and especially we see that in the sacred songs. And some of these songs were over 1000 years old and had been faithfully, carefully preserved and passed on through all those generations. And the most famous of them, these songs are often called the flower songs. And listen to how it begins. If you know the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe, this is very striking. It begins. And so this is a song that they’ve been transmitting for hundreds, maybe 1000s of years. “I ponder within my heart, where will I gather the fragrant flowers? Where will I gather the fragrant flowers?” And here’s one of the commentators on this book. His name is William Biggs’ comment. He says it was this ancient song was the story of mythic, of a mythic singer in his flower song, sung by the Nahuat, that is the indigenous people, for many centuries, it was a story of wanting to find the way into the flower world paradise.” So flower world was an expression for the paradise that they were longing for. “The place of the after world, a place of indescribable beauty, filled with the most gorgeous, iridescent and aromatic flowers and filled with equally beautiful birds who sang the most incredible symphony that was echoed by the flower mountain, where all of this was to be found, a place of everlasting peace and contentment. The singer of the flower song was in quest of this place.” So the flower world represent was this world of beauty, the paradise, the singer. So this is the song. This the story that’s being told by the song. “The singer wanted to find this place spoken of for millennium in the other flower songs of the Mesoamerican world. And he wanted it not just for himself. He wanted to gather these beautiful flowers so that he could bring them back down from the flower mountain and give them to the princes and to the people, so they too could share in this paradise.” And so again, if you know the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe, this is very striking that he was seeking to gather these beautiful flowers from the flower world paradise and bring them back to share them with the princes and then with the people, so they also could share in these blessings. “But even as he thinks that he has found the flower mountain, led by the radiant hummingbird, before he can gather the flowers, the vision vanishes, and the singer is crushed as he realizes that it’s not that the mountain and its redemptive flowers don’t exist – no, that’s not the problem. The problem is that the singer is unworthy of this quest, and he has failed and wailed his lament.” And so that’s how the song that they’ve been singing, like the central Psalm, been singing for centuries, ends realizing that I’m not worthy. I can’t enter in. And so it’s a tragic failure. And so it ends the song that they’re singing. It ends in this tragedy. And William Biggs continues. He says “the ruling elites had twisted the pagan religion of the Mayan world to believe that the little people were not worthy to enter the flower world unless they died in battle, serving the rulers or as temple sacrifices, serving the Aztec priesthood. But otherwise, as ordinary people, they could never be worthy.” And so this song, which was at the center of their culture, begins with so much hope and ends with despair, like a lamentation. And so this sheds a whole new light on Juan Diego’s experience. Because what it shows is that the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe was fulfilling this prophecy, basically, which God had been preparing the people for centuries. And so remember Juan Diego’s own words as when they first when at the very beginning of this apparition, before he even sees our Blessed Mother, he says, where? Because it begins by him hearing beautiful birds and feeling called by the beautiful singing of the birds, which is one of the signs of the flower world. And that was actually, it was actually a bird, a hummingbird, that guided in the song, that guided the person to this flower world. And so here’s what Juan Diego, drawn by the hearing this beautiful bird song, he says, “Where am I? Where do I find myself? Is it possible that I am in the place our ancient ancestors, our grandparents told us about, in the Land of the Flowers”. And so when we hear that in the Land of the Flowers, we say, Oh, that’s nice. He’s in a place with a lot of flowers, but it meant so much more to them. It meant in paradise, “in the Land of the Flowers, in the land of corn, of our flesh, of our sustenance, possibly in the land of heaven.” So am I in paradise? Am I in heaven? That’s what he’s sensing. “By any chance, am I worthy of what I hear?” Because, as a common person, he knew he couldn’t be worthy. And so even in many details, even the very the particular birds. Because the account of Guadalupe mentions the particular birds, even the particular birds, the particular colors, the specific phrases, and especially the miraculous flowers are, follow very closely this account, I mean the song, the flower song, and where the first singer failed. Now there’s like a new hero, Juan Diego, who succeeds. So Juan Diego, who was just a humble, ordinary person, who, according to the culture, could not be worthy, is now made worthy, not only to enter into this world, but also to bring back flowers. And not just bring back flowers, but you could say, bring back the most beautiful flower, this image of Our Blessed Mother. And so when the people began hearing this, they realized that what was what the Spanish this faith that the Spanish were bringing to them was actually not new, but was actually what they had been being prepared for, for centuries. What was actually at the heart of their expectation. This was like our Blessed Mother was like the new flower world prophecy. You know, we know that that was the sign our Blessed Mother gave one day. It was these miraculous roses for the bishop. And so William Biggs again, continues his commentary says, “Now there was a new song racing along the runner path” (you know, that’s the way that the towns were connected, by runner paths), “telling everyone that the new singer who has embraced the Spaniards, ‘God of near and far,’ as the Nahuat called him in their flower song.” And that’s what our Blessed Mother says when she when she appears to Juan Diego, she says, she speaks that she is the mother of the “God of near and far.” “Had found the way to the flower mountain, and he had brought back the precious flowers that would enrapture all who see and possess them now and forever.” And so finally, after all these years, suddenly, someone has gone to the flower world and come back. And he says, “this was the story that resulted in 1000s upon 1000s of Indians pouring out of their hinterlands for many hundreds of miles around Mexico City. They came begging for what they would not accept for free during the prior 10 years of Spanish effort.” And again, these are people who are so far away that they haven’t even a lot of them haven’t even encountered yet the image. And so William Biggs says, “why have we not heard of this before? Why has it all been attributed to the image on the Telma of Juan Diego?” And he says, this is his response. He says, “simple, – the image was meant for the rest of us over the intervening five, 500 years, but the flower song was meant for the people of Meso America at that time.” So he’s saying that for them, even more than the image, it was the story of what happened. “Now, it was sung not as a myth, but rather as truth by a baptized Indian, one who was deemed worthy to enter the flower world paradise and bring back the good news to his people. As a true Indian found his way to flower mountain through baptism.” Rather than attributing the mass conversion solely to the miraculous image of Juan Diego’s tilma, this Book proposes that it was the story of Juan Diego’s encounter with our Blessed Mother that catalyzed their conversions. And so this was a massive conversion of approximately 10 million people to Christianity in just one decade. Remember, this was the people that the bishop had said are unusually resistant. And suddenly this people who seemed unusually resistant because of the cultural differences, respond. And this, Robert Royal says, “This has this response, such an effective conversion has never happened in Christian history. There’s no other conversion of that scale and that rapidity, and any of the story of Christian evangelization. So this was an extraordinary event. And he quotes, he says, “The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, who is no friend to Catholicism, has commented, ‘one can only imagine the astonishment of the hundreds and 1000s of Indians who asked for baptism as they came to realize that they were being asked to adore a God who sacrificed Himself for men, instead of asking men to sacrifice themselves to Gods, as the Aztec religion demanded’.” And so this was the point I tried to make in the podcast. This was an extraordinary event of Church history. There’s no other parallel in the history of the Church, and it was precisely an apparition of Our Blessed Mother, a private revelation to Juan Diego, that occasioned this powerful response. And so there’s an ancient traditional phrase “Praeparatio evangelica,” that preparation that the  Fathers of the Church spoke of, the preparation for the gospel, and that they speak of how we see in the Old Testament, how God prepared His chosen people for the coming of our Lord. And then the Church Fathers often also spoke of how the pagans, even by the Greek the Greek culture, the Greek thought and philosophy, and also by the Roman organization, were being prepared for the spread, the coming and the spread of the gospel. But this book is saying that we also see a preparation for the gospel in the culture here in was what was Mesoamerica; God preparing, providentially preparing the people, the Americas for Christianity. And so what we realized now, because remember that this was not the Spanish missionaries trying to create a story that would fit the culture the Indians, because they didn’t even understand this story. This was way too new. This was God Himself who had prepared this in the people. And so this was not, and there was no syncretism here. There was not taking pagan elements or compromising the gospel. On the contrary, this is how the Lord Himself prepared a people for the gospel. And so in conclusion, as in this time of Advent, in this time of Advent, that is the liturgical time of Advent, where we prepared to celebrate Christmas, but also this new Advent that we’re living as the Lord is calling us to prepare for His new coming, His new manifestation. We don’t know exactly what form that will take, but that’s what He’s speaking to us about. So we give thanks to our Blessed Mother, through whom Jesus came the first time. And at Guadalupe, we have another great example of her continuing to prepare people and how powerful that can be when there’s someone who responds with faith. If Juan Diego hadn’t responded with faith, what would have happened? We don’t know, but because he responded with faith, these manifestations, these private revelations – well, the fruits have been like unprecedented and they continue. And it’s that same, our same Blessed Mother is right now, and even I think, through this little mission, preparing for new graces, new manifestation, a new outpouring of grace at this new Tepeyac. And so may she open our hearts, and the hearts of all God’s children, to our Lord Jesus. And so I’ll just end by quoting this from, from the first reading today, from Isaiah, “shout for joy. O daughter Zion, sing joyfully. O Israel, be glad and exalt with all your heart. O daughter Jerusalem, the Lord has removed the judgment against you. He has turned away your enemies, the king of Israel, the Lord is in your midst. You have no further misfortune to fear. On that day, it shall be said to Jerusalem, fear not O Zion. Be not discouraged. The Lord is in your midst a mighty savior. He will rejoice over you with gladness and renew you in His love.” Amen. 

KEYWORDS / PHRASES:
Luke 3:10-18
Zephaniah 3:10-18a