Pilgrims of hope in the Jubilee year
Homily for Epiphany, 2025
Merry Christmas! The Christmas season continues until next Sunday, the Baptism of the Lord. Merry Christmas!
Happy New Year! And not just any new year! Happy Jubilee Year 2025! Perhaps you’ve heard about Pope Francis opening the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City on Christmas Eve, and the opening of holy doors in Rome’s other basilicas and elsewhere around the world, including our own Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart and other holy sites here in the Archdiocese of Newark.
This year marks the first regular Jubilee of the third Christian millennium—a Jubilee first announced almost a quarter century ago by Pope St. John Paul II at the close of the Great Jubilee of the year 2000. There was also, in 2016, an extraordinary Holy Year declared by Pope Francis, a Jubilee of Mercy. This year Pope Francis has declared a Jubilee of Hope: hope, the theological virtue that links faith and love or charity. “Hope does not disappoint,” St. Paul wrote in Romans chapter 5. Pope Francis took that phrase, “Hope does not disappoint,” for the title of his decree promulgating this Jubilee of Hope.
What is a jubilee year? Its oldest roots extend to the Old Testament, to the Law of Moses, which called for the canceling of debts and freeing of slaves every 50 years. In the Church, jubilee years go back to the Middle Ages, with special significance, solemnity, and celebration for the century, half-century, and even quarter-century years (like 2025). These special anniversary numbers underscore how all of human history is both divided by, and counted from, the greatest miracle in all of time and space, the single most important thing that has ever happened: the miracle we call the Incarnation, the uniting of God’s eternal, divine nature with our frail humanity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, true God and true man. In the words of St. John Paul II in promulgating the 2000 Jubilee:
With the Incarnation, God entered human history, eternity entered time…. Since God has entered our human time, there arises the duty to sanctify time.… For the Church the Jubilee is a year of special grace, of remission of sins and the punishment due to them, a year of reconciliation between disputing parties.
How can we sanctify the time ahead of us in 2025? How can we make this year different from last year? The same 12 months, the same four seasons await us. But there are different ways of moving through and experiencing the world of time and space.
For example, fifteen years ago, long before I was a deacon, I had the opportunity to visit the city of Rome for a very silly reason. Among the many hats I’ve worn in my life, I’m a film writer, and a very silly movie had been partly filmed in Rome—the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code sequel, Angels & Demons—and the filmmakers wanted film writers like to me to tour the locations in Rome. So they took us on the official Angels & Demons tour of Rome, which I’m here to tell you is a terrible way to experience those beautiful churches and locations! Ah, but the following year our archdiocese sponsored a pilgrimage to Rome, led by Cardinal Tobin’s predecessor, Archbishop Myers—and so I had the chance to return to Rome as a pilgrim. The city was the same, but my experience was completely different, because I came as a pilgrim.
A jubilee year is a reminder that we are pilgrims in this world. Our home is not here. Our treasure is not here. We live in hope—hope that does not disappoint. We seek something more, Someone more—like the Magi, travelers from the east whose journey of hope following the star to Bethlehem and adoration of the Christ child we celebrate on this feast of Epiphany. They were pilgrims. We are pilgrims. Many will make literal pilgrimages to Rome this year to pass through the Holy Doors at St. Peter’s and the other basilicas. Most of us won’t be going to Rome, but, in the spirit of pilgrimage, most of us can probably visit the cathedral and other local sites with holy doors.
Of course going to Newark, or even to Rome, and passing through a physical doorway, even one rarely opened, will not by itself make us holier! The essential pilgrimage is the pilgrimage within. As Pope Benedict XVI said of the Magi:
They were filled with expectation, not satisfied with their secure income and their respectable place in society. They were looking for something greater.… They wanted to know how we succeed in being human.… They wanted to understand the truth about ourselves and about God and the world. Their outward pilgrimage was an expression of their inward journey, the inner pilgrimage of their hearts.
This, above all, is the pilgrimage we must pursue in 2025. We must be “Pilgrims of Hope,” in the repeated phrase of Pope Francis, the motto for this Jubilee of Hope: “Pilgrims of Hope.”
How do we do that? Perhaps we’re not feeling particularly hopeful at the start of this year, for any number of reasons! How can we be pilgrims of hope—hope that does not disappoint? How can we follow in the footsteps of the Magi, the original pilgrims of hope?
I can’t answer that question completely today, but I can say this. We’ve all heard that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We can take the first step today in our year-long pilgrimage by asking God to lead and guide us on our journey this year. What star may he send to you or to me? I don’t know. I don’t have to know! This isn’t a New Year’s resolution, a plan of self-improvement. We’re pilgrims, not cruise-ship passengers. There’s no published itinerary!
There are established practices. The benefits of pilgrimage, inward and outward, depend on good habits—especially
regular prayer,
frequenting the sacraments, and
works of charity and penance.
“Aren’t these just things we’re supposed to be doing anyway!” Yes! Are we doing them? If not, there’s no better time to start! And if we are, then we have good reason for hope that God will lead us in the true pilgrimage of the spirit in this Jubilee of Hope. Hope that does not disappoint!
Holy Father, lead us as pilgrims of hope in this Jubilee Year of Hope. Like the Magi, may we encounter you in some new way this year, and so be ready, like them, at the year’s end, to depart by another way. Amen.
In the OT Jubilee, weren’t lands supposed to be returned to their original owners, so that no tribe would lose its ancestral heritage? I understand that was often honored in the breach, but God’s law was solid and beautiful, and would have prevented much poverty. Do you love Michael Card’s Jubilee song? I do.
Thank you for this lovely piece. I can’t remember a year when I was more in need of hope, at least not in the last quarter century. ❤️