The readings for Mass today seem to be all over the place (a common complaint about the Revised Common Lectionary, it seems). The Old Testament reading is God giving the Ten Commandments. The Epistle is St. Paul telling the Corinthians the first time around that the message of the Cross stymies both Jews and Greeks because of their peculiar cultural blinders. The Gospel is Jesus driving the money changers and livestock salespeople out of the temple. Turning to the Psalm is no help; it is Psalm 19, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament His handiwork."
At this point people writing reflections or sermons either give up or they focus on a small bit and run with it.
Truth be told, life is like that. It's messy, there is a lot coming at us from all sides, and somehow we just keep up with it with some varying degree of success or failure. What we don't absorb washes over us to be caught on the next round. These readings are like that. They are all important, they all need to be considered and incorporated at the same time, but not necessarily all processed together. We need to understand the Law of God, how we need to stop putting other things in His place as God, to worship Him, not His creation, to stop periodically and catch one's breath, to be in harmony with your family and your neighbours and to do right by them. We need to understand that as we have fallen short, that we are in a separated state from God, Jesus paid the price to bring us back together, which due to various cultural blinders is pretty much inexplicable to anyone anywhere, but God still did it that way for reasons overarching and sublime. We need to understand that worshipping God is not a financial transaction, a give and take of goods and services, but a relationship, a relationship Jesus made possible by His death and resurrection. And to top it all off, we need to understand this mighty creator of all that makes forces of nature seem puny in comparison wants a relationship with us.
God wants a relationship with us. He sent us Moses, the prophets, and Jesus to tell us. He crafted the Church as a collective of people in relationship with Him. He had Jesus die on the Cross to get in Death's face and raising Jesus to break Death's hold on us. Thanks to Jesus nothing now stops us. If we follow Him, unite ourselves to his sacrifice in Baptism, partake in His sacrifice in His Body and Blood, and engage with God in the company of fellow followers, God will have a relationship with us. The breach is healed. Turning from what separated us from God in the first place (namely the presumptuous sins of Psalm 19!), let us rejoice in that relationship.
Comments