Don’t make a spectacle of sacraments

  Wedding is a celebration. Certainly, it’s also is a sacrament. So is baptism. But we often forget this fact and turn weddings into a pageant, or a spectacle.   

 Pope Francis recently lambasted the trend in the church community to convert wedding into a spectacle and vanity. This is a different type of celebration which often leads to vulgar display of wealth and influence in the society. In other words, a public display of excessive pride in or admiration of one's own appearance or achievements. Is this Kingdom of God? No.

“Our human weakness prefers a spectacle,” Pope Francis said in his homily at Santa Marta recently. This sometimes happens “in celebrating certain sacraments”, he said, leading us to think about weddings in particular. We have to ask ourselves whether these people “have come to receive a sacrament, to have a feast like at Cana in Galilee, or have they come to have a pageant, to be seen, for vanity?” There is thus a continuous temptation: not to accept that the Kingdom of God is silent, he said.

 People are eager to make wedding and baptism celebrations into a kind of spectacle with music, dance, cultural programmes and scrumptious lunch or dinner. Liquor flows very liberally. A huge money is spent for such celebrations. And everybody forgets Jesus. 

 Remember that the excluded are waiting on the other side. We refuse to acknowledge even their existence. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The great spectacle goes on in the name of baptism and wedding. There’s no wonder that many such weddings finally end up in divorces years later.

 When we get into such pageants, please remember whether we’re on the right side of our Lord. A power show might give you instant satisfaction, importance and power, but the crucial question is: does our Lord want this kind of spectacle along with sacraments? Not at all.   

  Pope recommended a brief examination of conscience to avoid falling into the temptation of the spectacle, by asking a few simple questions. “Are you a Christian? Yes! Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Yes! Do you believe in the sacraments? Yes! Do you believe that Jesus is there and that He has come here now? Yes, yes, yes!” Well then, Pope Francis continued, “why don’t you go to adore Him, why don’t you go to Mass, why don’t you take Communion, why don’t you draw near to the Lord”, so that his Kingdom may “grow” within you? After all, the Pontiff stated, “the Lord never says that the Kingdom of God is a spectacle”.

 His words are clear. Why don’t you come closer to our Lord instead of getting into the trap of pageants.

 “It (sacrament) is a celebration, but it’s different! It’s a beautiful celebration, a grand feast. And Heaven will be feast, but not a spectacle,” he says. Instead, our human weakness prefers a spectacle.

 In other words, the Pope said, “the Kingdom of God is not a spectacle.” So often, the spectacle is a caricature of the Kingdom of God. Indeed, we must never “forget that it was one of the three temptations”: in the desert, Jesus is told: “go to the pinnacle of the temple and throw yourself down, and everyone will believe. Make a spectacle”. “However, the Kingdom of God is silent, it grows within; the Holy Spirit makes it grow with our willingness, in our soil, which we must prepare. But it grows slowly, silently,” he said.

  The Kingdom of God is humble, like a seed: humble. However, it becomes big by the power of the Holy Spirit. And we have to let it grow within us, without boasting.