If you were to ask a bunch of Christians what the oldest heresy faced by the Church is, I’d bet that most would guess Arianism, an early 4th-century heresy that said Jesus wasn’t really divine. In fact, the threat of Arianism led to the great councils and the Nicene Creed. But the first major heresy goes back centuries earlier, almost to the beginning of Christianity itself.
That heresy was Gnosticism, which said -- among many things -- that Jesus wasn’t really human, but only appeared so. And, interestingly, if we meditate on today’s Gospel passage, we can see how Gnosticism itself is a kind of wrongheaded, misguided defense of Jesus from criticisms that Our Lord faced in His own lifetime.
Today, we hear Jesus lamenting how His critics simply can’t accept that a true prophet, especially the Messiah, could eat and drink freely and socialize with sinners. This is all too ordinary and human! A figure from God should be more other-worldly, separated, and inaccessible. And the Gnostics, accepting these kinds of premises, said, “You’re right; the Son of God could not actually be so lowly. That’s why all this human stuff was just an act.”
But orthodox Christianity never shied away from Jesus’ full humanity. We rejoice in the fact that Jesus did live an actual human life and, what’s more, that Jesus, during His lifetime, was happy to be around ordinary, sinful people like us. This gives us not only the knowledge that Jesus does love us but also the hope that genuine holiness is possible even through our ordinary, non-elite, unmystical lives.
This is definitely part of the secret of the Rosary. In today’s world, where prayer and silence are so hard to come by, people might think of the Rosary as very hard, the spiritual equivalent of a marathon. But that’s not how its great proponents — from the early Dominicans to Venerable Patrick Peyton — thought of it.
They understood that the Rosary is a very accessible prayer, composed of the most basic prayers, whose “mysteries” are not difficult doctrines, but simple scenes from the life of Christ and Mary. If you were able to hear the talk by Alex Jones, the CEO of Hallow, from the Notre Dame Rosary Rally, this is one of his beautiful points; as a young man, searching for spiritual greatness, the Rosary seemed to him to be too simple, a prayer for “old ladies.” But after following the advice of his spiritual director, and after becoming a husband and father, Alex has come to realize that the Rosary’s power lies precisely in this simple accessibility.
As our Lord proclaims at the end of today’s Gospel, “Wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”