Quasimodo: Our Story!

In Victor Hugo’s famous novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame an abandoned baby is discovered on the steps of Our Lady of Paris, the city’s grandest cathedral. This baby is so incredibly deformed, having a twisted face and a hunched back, that not even his mother loves him enough to care for him. Discovered on the cathedral steps on the Second Sunday of Easter (Quasimodo Geniti), this baby is taken in, baptized with the name of the day on which he is found, and raised within the confines of the cathedral to become its bell-ringer. It seems only within the Church can such a grotesque mockery of a person find refuge.

You and I have a lot in common with Quasimodo. Although we may not have a twisted face or a hunched back, spiritually we are no more impressive before God than Quasimodo was to those around him. Consider the words of the Psalmist: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). After the great flood, the Lord God makes it clear that “the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). And the Apostle Paul is quick to remind us that we are all, by nature, “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1).

Thanks be to God, therefore, that His Holy Spirit has led us to the Church, where—just like Quasimodo—we find refuge in Holy Baptism. Baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, no longer do the twistedness and deformity of our sinful nature cause us to look so repulsive to our heavenly Father. For by going to the cross in our place, Jesus became the Quasimodo we are by nature—having “no form or majesty that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him” (Isaiah 53:2)—that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:21)!

Only within the Church did that grotesque mockery of the person named Quasimodo find refuge. And so it is that only within the Church do you and I—who by nature are grotesquely sinful—find refuge, forgiveness, and new life in Jesus Christ our resurrected Lord. Thanks be to God!