The Presentation of Unity:
The Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time 2025
February 2, 2025
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Malachi 3:1-4; Psalm 24; Hebrews 2:14-18; Luke 2:22-40
The parents of Jesus were obedient to the faith when they presented their son to God in the Temple as is prescribed in the rituals. It is akin to our practice of baptism, and Jesus learned obedience of faith from his parents. Simeon and Anna were the final representatives of the old covenant, and they were present to see the inauguration of the new promise through Jesus. This was another step for the religion of the Jews to expand beyond Israel into the realm of the Gentiles. Christianity has always moved beyond itself and has tended towards inclusion and ecumenism.
In this Jubilee Year of Hope, Catholics are asked to think beyond their own rituals and practices as a move towards unity. It is fair to ask, “Into what faith is one being baptized or initiated?” At Mass on January 25th, Pope Francis called on all Catholics to take “a decisive step forward toward unity around a common date for Easter.” The Eastern Orthodox Catholics use the Julian calendar, devised by Julius Caesar, and the Western, that is, Roman Catholics, use the Gregorian calendar created in 1582 by Gregory the Thirteenth. This year, Easter falls on the same date, but last year it was six weeks apart. The Pope said that Catholics are open to accepting a common date of unity. He made this statement at the close of the Week for Christian Unity, which coincided with the 1,700thanniversary of the Council of Nicaea that set a date for calculating the Easter date.
How much of a value is unity among Christians? Unity is among the top value and virtue in Scripture and in the Mass. We pray for it during each Mass as we ask the Holy Spirit to keep us unified, and we may not understand yet what it requires of us. How willing are we to examine our practices and move towards unity? Some Catholics will be angry with Easter’s date change; others will go along with it begrudgingly; still others will see the great value of sacrifice and unity and will feel virtuous.
What does unity mean for us? I’ll tell you what it is not. It is not that other Christians have to become Catholic. We are not to expect that all Christian denominations become Catholic. It means that we must engage in dialogue with other traditions, to learn from them, to notice and to appreciate the good within their expressions and then to share with one another. It means that we move towards common thinking and common experiences. We think and feel together as an ecclesial community, and it might mean that we expand our practices and rituals as a sign of our common bonds of affection.
The feast of the Presentation continues the outward expansion of the life of Jesus – for he is the revelation to the Gentiles and the light for Israel. The earlier feast of Epiphany showed that the Gentiles, peoples of other faiths, are included in salvation. Any expansion of thought creates mechanisms of change. The works of Jesus show him reaching out to the Romans, the Syro-Phoenicians, the Samaritans, and all the people of the known world came to meet him. Our faith today continues the expansive life of Jesus. We continue to move to the margins, beyond the walls of the church, beyond the ideological frontiers that we build, and we strive for unity in Christ. It is all about unity, not standing still, not holding onto practices. It is about letting our hearts be moved to see the faith of others – and befriending those who can enrich us. We will then understand the prayer – that all may be one.
Scripture for Daily Mass
First Reading:
Monday: (Hebrews 11) Women received back their dead through resurrection. Some were tortured and would not accept deliverance, in order to obtain a better resurrection.
Others endured mockery, scourging, even chains and imprisonment.
Tuesday: (Hebrews 12) Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus.
Wednesday: (Hebrews 12) Endure your trials as “discipline”; God treats you as his sons. For what "son” is there whom his father does not discipline? At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it.
Thursday: (Hebrews 12) No, you have approached Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and countless angels in festal gathering.
Friday (Hebrews 13) Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect hospitality, for through it some have unknowingly entertained angels. Be mindful of prisoners as if sharing their imprisonment, and of the ill-treated as of yourselves, for you also are in the body.
Saturday (Hebrews 13) Through Jesus, let us continually offer God a sacrifice of praise, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have; God is pleased by sacrifices of that kind.
Gospel:
Monday: (Mark 5) Jesus and his disciples came to the other side of the sea, to the territory of the Gerasenes. When he got out of the boat, at once a man from the tombs who had an unclean spirit met him.
Tuesday: (Mark 5) There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse.
Wednesday (Mark 6) When the sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished. They said, “Where did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him? What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands!
Thursday (Mark 6) Jesus summoned the Twelve and began to send them out two by two
and gave them authority over unclean spirits. He instructed them to take nothing for the journey but a walking stick–no food, no sack, no money in their belts.
Friday (Mark 6) King Herod heard about Jesus, for his fame had become widespread, and people were saying, "John the Baptist has been raised from the dead; That is why mighty powers are at work in him."
Saturday (Mark 6) He said to them, "Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while." People were coming and going in great numbers, and they had no opportunity even to eat.
Saints of the Week
February 2: The Presentation of the Lord is the rite by which the firstborn male is presented in the Temple as an offering to God. It occurs 40 days after the birth while the new mother is considered ritually unclean. Two church elders, Simeon and Anna, who represent the old covenant, praise Jesus and warn his mother that her heart will be pierced as her son will bring the salvation of many.
February 3: Blase, bishop and martyr (d. 316), was an Armenian martyr of the persecution of Licinius. Legends hold that a boy, choking to death on a fishbone, was miraculously cured. Blase's intercession has been invoked for cures for throat afflictions. The candles presented at Candlemas the day earlier are used in the rite of the blessings of throats.
February 3: Angsar, bishop (815-865), became a monk to preach to pagans. He lived at the French Benedictine monastery of New Corbie and was sent to preach in Denmark and Sweden. He was made abbot and then became archbishop of Hamburg. He is known as the Apostle of the North because he restored Denmark to the faith and helped bolster the faith of other Scandinavians.
February 4: John de Brito, S.J., priest, religious, and martyr (1647-1693), was a Portuguese Jesuit missionary who served in India and was named “The Portuguese Francis Xavier” to the Indians. De Brito was martyred because he counseled a Maravan prince during his conversion to give up all but one of his wives. One of the wives was a niece to the neighboring king, who set up a round of persecutions against priests and catechists.
February 5: Agatha, martyr, (d. 251), died in Sicily during the Diocletian persecution after she refused to give up her faith when sent to a brothel for punishment. She was subsequently tortured. Sicilians believe her intercession stopped Mount Etna from erupting the year after her burial. She has been sought as a protector against fire and in mentioned in the First Eucharistic prayer.
February 6: Paul Miki and Companions, martyrs (d. 1597), were martyred in Nagasaki, Japan for being Christians. Miki was a Jesuit brother and a native Japanese who was killed alongside 25 clergy, religious, and laypeople. They were suspended on crosses and killed by spears thrust into their hearts. Remnants of the Christian community continued through baptism without any priestly leadership. It was discovered when Japan was reopened in 1865.
February 8: Jerome Emiliani (1481-1537), was a Venetian soldier who experienced a call to be a priest during this imprisonment as a captor. He devoted his work to the education of orphans, abandoned children, the poor and hungry. He founded an order to help in his work, but he died during a plague while caring for the sick.
February 8: Josephine Bakhita (1869-1947) was a Sudanese who was sold as a slave to the Italian Consul, who treated her with kindness. She was baptized in Italy and took the name Josephine. Bakhita means fortunate. She was granted freedom according to Italian law and joined the Canossian Daughters of Charity where she lived simply as a cook, seamstress, and doorkeeper. She was known for her gentleness and compassion.
This Week in Jesuit History
- February 2, 1528. Ignatius arrived in Paris to begin his program of studies at the University of Paris.
- February 3, 1571. In Florida, the martyrdom of Fr. Louis Quiros and two novices, shot with arrows by an apostate Indian.
- February 4, 1617. An imperial edict banished all missionaries from China.
- February 5, 1833. The first provincial of Maryland, Fr. William McSherry, was appointed.
- February 6, 1612. The death of Christopher Clavius, one of the greatest mathematicians and scientists of the Society.
- February 7, 1878. At Rome, Pius IX died. He was sincerely devoted to the Society; when one of the cardinals expressed surprise that he could be so attached to an order against which even high ecclesiastics brought serious charges, his reply was: "You have to be pope to know the worth of the Society."
- February 8, 1885. In Chicago, Fr. Isidore Bourdreaux, master of novices at Florissant, Missouri, from 1857 to 1870, died. He was the first scholastic novice to enter the Society from any of the colleges in Missouri.
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