Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
As we continue our look at Franciscan spirituality from its doctrinal perspective, today we're going to talk about a triple primacy, which belongs to Jesus Christ.
Primacy just means being first.
Those called Christ's triple primacy, a universal primacy of election, of perfection, and an ontological primacy, so primacy in being.
First, Christ has a primacy of election, that means simply that God chose Jesus first.
God from all eternity saw the beings that He could create, some He selected and created to come into existence, among these, Christ occupies the center, as we've talked about before.
That's the eternal purpose realized in Christ Jesus that St. Paul speaks of in Ephesians 3 verse 11.
Christ is the wisdom which came forth from the mouth of the Most High, the firstborn before all creatures, and we read that in Sirach 24:3.
Christ's eternal predestination in the mind of God precedes the predestination of every created being.
Again, God chooses Jesus first.
Proverbs 8 verse 22 and following reads, the Lord possessed or created me at the beginning of His work, the first of His acts of old.
Ages ago, I was set up at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there was no depths, I was brought forth.
When He established the heavens, I was there.
When He marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside Him like a master workman, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing before Him always, rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the children of men.
We read in the Old Testament, book of Proverbs, and in the fullness of time, the mystery of the incarnation is accomplished.
St. Paul, who is the evangelist of the primacy, we could call Him.
St. Paul writes in Ephesians 1, verses 3 through 6, he says, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.
He destined or predestined us in love to be His sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, which He freely bestowed on us in His beloved, in the beloved.
So in those words, the primacy of Christ's election, as well as our predestination in Him, are clearly proclaimed by St. Paul.
We were born in the heart and in the mind of the Heavenly Father, who created everything in the beginning, or “in principio”, as the Latin phrase says, you know, the first book of the verse, the book of Genesis, the first verse, Genesis 1:1, what does it say?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Saints like St. Anthony of Padua, St. Jerome, and St. Augustine have interpreted that as meaning God created everything in His Son.
They understand in the beginning to mean in His Son.
Connecting Genesis 1:1 with John 1, verse 1 and verse 3, where the apostle says, in the beginning, was the Word and all things came to be through Him.
Blessed John Dun Scotus says that Christ is predestined before any other thing as the closest thing to the goal or purpose which God sets for creation.
And the purpose is that creation is for God's glory.
Christ again is the first in the divine election because His excellence occupies first place in the supreme hierarchy, says blessed John Dun Scotus.
And it's the best that always is the first thing that's willed, he says.
What's the first thing you want?
You want the best.
The first thing you have in mind when you're working to create or sculpt something.
So, in short, God willed Jesus first, plain and simple.
That's primacy of election, first primacy.
Ontological primacy or primacy of being says that not only is Jesus Christ first in election, but He's also first in being.
He's the first of all creatures since He's the exemplar and final cause of everything.
Exemplar just means that He's the model.
He's the original.
When God formed man, Tertullian says that He carved in man a likeness of the future Christ.
And God created all creatures in view of Christ so that as the apostle says, in everything He might have the primacy, meaning that He is the final cause of all things, Colossians 1:18.
Just before that, Colossians 1 verses 15 and 17, St. Paul says, He's the firstborn Christ.
He's the firstborn of all creation.
For in Him, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.
All things were created through Him and for Him.
He is before all things, and in Him, all things hold together.
This passage is of singular importance for Christology, and Franciscan Christology finds in it one of its most solid supports.
You can't say that the primogenitor of Christ, of which St. Paul speaks here, refers to the eternal word as such, because the eternal generation of the word is unique and can't be placed in relation with created beings.
The word isn't the firstborn.
Rather, He's the only begotten of the Father.
There is a difference there.
And firstborn of every creature can't mean the prince or the sovereign of all creation, because the original Greek text doesn't admit such a translation.
The word firstborn refers to a new form of life, different from the life that the word has in the bosom of the father.
And it presupposes other beings, too.
Similarly, in referring to His human, created existence, can St. Paul call Jesus Christ firstborn, placing Him, placing His created life alongside of us, all of us who are actually the secondborn.
So men and angels.
This is expressed even better in a famous passage of St. Paul, Romans 8:29.
He says, those whom He, God, foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.
In order that He might be the firstborn among many brethren, says the apostle.
What does that mean?
It's something that we talked about the other day.
It means that Christ isn't for Adam and his descendants.
Adam and his descendants are for Christ.
It's the other way around.
And Christ is the first willed by God, because He's the model, the original, and the model, the original is always the first thing that's intended by the maker before the replications are made, right?
Before you can make a copy of something, you've got to have an original.
Jesus is the original.
St. Francis, in his admonitions, says this, he says, consider, oh man, in what an excellent state the Lord has placed you, since He created and formed you according to the image of His Beloved Son, according to the flesh, and in His likeness, according to the spirit.
That's essentially ontological primacy of Christ, said in words of St. Francis.
Finally, Jesus has the primacy of perfection.
Jesus Christ is the most perfect created being, the cosmic synthesis of all created perfections.
He is the masterpiece of God in that sense.
St. Paul says in Ephesians 1:10, that it pleased the Father to recapitulate all things in Christ, things in heaven, and things on earth.
So just as charity sums up all of the precepts, just as charity is the bond of perfection, St. Paul says that in Colossians 3:14, so too Jesus is the one who sums up, who recapitulates the angelic world, human world, all created beings.
In Him all fullness dwells, says the apostle in Colossians 1:19.
In Him, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, he says in Colossians 2, verse 9.
So St. Paul sees in Jesus, the God-man, the fullness of all perfections.
Christ is a stupendous symphony of the finite gifts of nature, of grace, glory, but He surpasses all these, and all human imagination too, in His greatness.
This fullness of perfection is found in the embrace of the human with the divine nature in the unity of person, in Christ Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God, as St.
Paul says in Colossians 1:15, or He's called the highest beauty by St. Bonaventure, He's the only one in whom God fully delights, Jesus Christ.
This is why all creatures, imperfect as we are, we groan in our labor pains, as St. Paul says in Romans 8:22.
We groan, and we aspire to Christ, for whom we were made and in whom we can touch and reach the beatific shore of the infinite.
The fullness of all created perfections in Christ constitutes His absolute foundation of excellence, His universal primacy, and His universal causality, because, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, he says the most perfect being is the exemplary cause of everything which comes after, here we apply that to Christ, and he says that which is supreme is in a given order, is the cause of the beings of that same order, and we apply that again to Jesus Christ.
So underneath it all, you can see St. Thomas really was a Franciscan, if you don't remember anything else from this homily, just remember in his heart, he was Franciscan.
And even the first foundation of the universal regality of Christ is seen in the fullness of every perfection, Christ's kingship, His regality, before it was actually a conquest of Christ the Redeemer, after His victory over sin and death on Calvary, before that His regality is first and foremost a right which belongs to Jesus as the God-man, due to His absolute excellence over all creatures, since as man, He is the greatest creature of them all.
So He's man in His created humanity, He's God in His divinity, and in His person, the two go together.
Jesus is king, for this, I was born, He told Pilate, John 18:37.
From all eternity, He is the Messiah, the Christ that is the anointed, the consecrated King of the Heavenly Father.
Those who lift up not only their minds but also their hearts and their wills to Jesus will taste of His goodness and His beauty and His sweetness, and they'll recognize that our most genuine and most profound longings are for Him, as we read in Sirach 24 verses 20 through 22, and we'll close with this, let's close this quote from Sirach, it says, for the remembrance of me, meaning Jesus, is sweeter than honey, and my inheritance sweeter than the honeycomb.
Those who eat of me will hunger for more, and those who drink me will thirst for more.
The one who obeys me will not be put to shame, and those who work with me will not sin.
So let's ask Our Lady then for the grace to give her Son, the primacy, the first place that He deserves.
First place in our minds, in our hearts, in our choices, and in our lives, too.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.

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