The Litany Project: Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, Part 21

Through Thy most divine life, Jesus, deliver us.

Jesus lived a human life. He was like us in everything except sin. He knew what it was like to be hungry and thirsty and tired. He knew what it was like to feel emotions; He even wept at the death of His friend Lazarus. He knew what it was like to be tempted. Jesus was fully human.

But Jesus was also fully divine, and He lived a divine life. In fact, He is divine life. Throughout the Gospels, we see Jesus in constant communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit. We see Him, as He says, teaching what He hears from the Father and doing the works the Father gives Him to do. We see Him obeying the Father’s will all the way to the cross.

Through Thy labors, Jesus, deliver us.

Jesus worked. As a child and young man, He learned the trade of carpentry from Joseph and labored alongside His foster father. After Joseph passed away, Jesus likely kept the family business going until it was time to take up another job, His public ministry that would lead to the Paschal mystery.

We must follow Jesus’ example. Our work is important, and it provides us an opportunity to serve God and others. As we go about our daily tasks, whatever they may be, we should always begin with prayer, offering our work to God and asking for His help. We should also stop briefly during our work periods to focus our attention on our Lord, if only for a few moments. Prayer should accompany the end of each job, too, as we thank God for another task accomplished. This way, our work becomes sanctified, just as Jesus’ labors always were.

The Litany Project: Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, Part 20

Through the mystery of Thy holy Incarnation, Jesus, deliver us.

The final series of petitions in this litany invites us to reflect on various aspects of Jesus’ life, and they remind us that Jesus’ entire life is salvific. Jesus redeems us through the Paschal mystery, to be sure, but also through His birth and His hidden years, His work and His public ministry. 

With this petition, we meditate on the mystery of Jesus’ Incarnation. The divine Son of God, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, begotten by the Father from all eternity became a human being, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Jesus was and is fully God and fully Man. He is one divine Person with two natures. While our human minds struggle to grasp this mystery, our faith accepts it as truth, for God has revealed it. 

Through Thy nativity, Jesus, deliver us.

We are all so familiar with the Christmas story that we may easily take it for granted. So today take a few minutes to slowly read and meditate on Luke 2, paying close attention to the details and imagining yourself in the scenes. If you were in the fields with the shepherds, for instance, what would you have thought? How would you have felt? Would you have gone with the others to see this newborn infant lying in a manger? How would you have reacted to that tiny Child, that small Savior of the whole world?

Through Thine infancy, Jesus, deliver us.

God became a baby. The divine Son, consubstantial with the Father, true God, light from light, became an infant. Jesus was fully dependent on Mary and Joseph for all His needs. He had to learn how to do everything, just like any baby. He was almost certainly cute and cuddly, like most babies, but He also cried and needed changing. 

That is how much our Lord loves us. He emptied Himself completely. He became a baby. Yet He never stopped being God.

The Litany Project: Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, Part 19

From the spirit of fornication, Jesus, deliver us.

Fornication is not a word people use very often these days, mostly perhaps because they do not care to acknowledge the sinfulness of the act. Specifically, fornication means sexual activity outside marriage between people who are not married (sexual activity outside marriage between people who are married is adultery).  

The spirit of fornication, however, implies something broader, particularly the impurity that leads to acts of fornication. It is a disorder in us, something that turns our desires upside down and inside out, something that tugs at us, drawing us away from God and from the moral law He has so perfectly set for us. The spirit of fornication nudges us to think that lust is not so bad or that just a little peek or a little off-color joke will not hurt anything. But what we are really doing is looking at other human beings not as God’s children endowed with human dignity but as objects for our own use. 

This is why we must pray that Jesus deliver us from the spirit of fornication, for it is a threat to the love that our Lord commands us to have for each other and for God.

From everlasting death, Jesus, deliver us.

Everlasting death is the consequence of living in grave sin and refusing to repent right up to the end. It is essentially choosing one’s disordered will, one’s serious sins over God’s perfect will and over His love. God has given us free will because without that gift we cannot truly love, but free will comes with a risk because we can turn our backs on God and become slaves to sin. We can choose everlasting death, separation from God for all eternity. And there is no greater horror than that.

From the neglect of Thine inspirations, Jesus, deliver us.

Jesus is always guiding us, always inspiring us, always nudging us (sometimes rather vigorously) toward the right path, which leads straight to Him. But are we listening? Are we responding? Or are we like St. Augustine who once prayed that God heal him of his sinful ways...but not quite yet?

We neglect or turn away from Jesus’ inspirations only to our detriment. We must learn how to hear our Lord, through Scripture, through the sacraments, in prayer, in the words and actions of other people. Then we have to set aside our own preferences and follow His ways, confident that what He wants is a lot better for us than our whims and even our plans.

The Litany Project: Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, Part 18

From Thy wrath, Jesus, deliver us.

We don’t like to think about Jesus’s wrath. It’s highly uncomfortable, and we would certainly prefer to picture Jesus as meek and mild, kind and loving. He is all of those, of course, but the fact is, Jesus hates sin. He doesn’t hate us, but He hates seeing us fall into sin, reject His will, and go down a path that will obviously harm us. This is what triggers His wrath.

Remember when Jesus’ cleansed the Temple? This is a prime example of how His wrath works. Something had gone drastically wrong in God’s house. The animal sellers and money changers filled the court with what must have been chaos. Imagine the noise and smell. And this situation made Jesus angry, righteously angry. So He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out. He turned over tables, spilled coins, and generally made His displeasure clearly known. He told people to stop making His Father’s house a marketplace. 

Remember, too, that we are God’s temples. When we are in a state of grace, God dwells within us. So when we make our temples a noisy, filthy mess, Jesus is going to get angry, and He will make us feel the consequences of our choices. This isn’t only so that He can punish us; rather, it’s so we can change, get cleaned up, and become a “house of prayer” and a place of love for Him to dwell.

From the snares of the devil, Jesus, deliver us.

The devil tempts us all the time. He lays attractive snares, trying to catch us with things that seem good but are really harmful to us. We have to be on the lookout constantly so that we don’t get caught, but as always, we can’t do this on our own. We need God’s grace to strengthen us, enlighten us, and protect us so that we don’t fall for the devil’s tricks.