“Here is your God.” Behold, your God. Those are the words we heard from the book of
Isaiah. It goes on: He comes with
vindication, with divine recompense, he comes to save you. It goes on, talking of all the miraculous
healing that will happen, all great cause for rejoicing on this Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of rejoicing. But, the future, what will happen, can
distract us, almost water down, the exultant immanence of the Hebrew
acclamation: Hinneh elohekem! “Here
Is your God.” Not, here’s the
spot where he will be, just hang on; certainly not, there’s where he will be,
but he’s distant now, so don’t bother Him.
No. Here is your God. The cry might go up… “where?”
Imagine hearing
this scripture in Jesus’ time. Imagine
yourself a Palestinian Jew, a lost sheep of the house of Israel, a member of an
exploited client kingdom of the Roman Empire, a peasant farmer maybe,
constantly in fear of a poor harvest.
You’re faithful, and you trust wholeheartedly that God will come and
water this desert so that it will bloom, but right now, not much is blooming. You’re hungry.
“Here is our God?” Where?
Certainly not in Herod, the King who was meant to be God’s servant, a
king who should show forth God’s providential care in his beneficent
reign. No, Herod Antipas was selfishly
opulent at best, and as ruthlessly oppressive as Rome would allow the rest of
the time. But there had been someone,
someone who made you feel that God could actually be close to you here and now.
He was
odd, decidedly odd. There was no denying
that. But compelling; strangely
compelling. You didn’t go out into the
desert to see someone like Herod, dressed in fine clothing. You weren’t attracted by money, by the reed
that adorned some of Herod’s coins. This
odd man on the outskirts, he was what drew you.
He talked of the coming judgment, that you knew all about, but then he
invited: repent, and be baptized, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Here,
is this God you found here? In the man who said that these Jordan waters,
this rather unimpressive stream, could wash you clean of the sins that bound
you? But he’s
in prison now, because your world is one in which everything good gets locked
up and then killed. Where is God?
And now
there’s another man, a wandering teacher, homeless it seems. Funny accent, they say he was born in
Bethlehem, but grew up in Egypt of all places and then moved to Nazareth, some Hicksville
village you’ve never heard of, and nobody’s quite sure who his real father is! And you keep asking him who he is, “are you
the one we’re waiting for?” And he won’t
give a straight answer. He just keeps on healing people! Here
is our God?
Yes. Here is our God. Not in opulence, not in green pastures. In the desert. In the odd one. In the other.
In those outside the limits of polite conversation. In those in whom at would be very easy to be
offended. But the route is happiness is to
not be offended at him. Some people live
there on those margins. Those are the
people to whom we need to constantly be proclaiming, “Here is your God!” That proclamation could be in words. Or it could be in deeds. Jesus just kept on healing. It’s only God who can wash away sins. It’s only God who can make a desert bloom. But we’re not powerless, not most of us, at
least, gathered here.
For those
of us who don’t live on the margins, that place where we can say “Here is your
God,” we can go there. Our Holy Cross
Constitutions mandate us to “stand with the poor and the afflicted, because only
from there can we appeal as Jesus did for the conversion and the deliverance of
all.” Only from there.
Almost
100 times over the past month, someone from our parish’s St. Vincent de Paul
has taken a bag of food like this one to a family in need and has told them,
all of this food is a gift from the people of Holy Cross parish. In handing over this bag, full of items so
many of you have given, who might have said, and who might have heard? “Here is
your God.” What about when some of our
eighth graders went on Friday to dole out soup at St. Augustine’s soup
kitchen? With them, I think I heard
reecho: “Here is your God.” What about
all the acts of simple healing mercy done by so many people sitting here that I
know nothing about?
Here at
this table, we are fed. Here is our
God. The God who feeds. Over the next week, I will baptize two babies
and countless confessions will be heard on Wednesday night at our penance
service and on Saturday morning during our regular reconciliation slot. Here is our God. The God who heals.
At your
baptism, you were probably blessed on the ears and on the mouth to be a hearer
and speaker of good news. Here is our
God. May that be ever on your ears, on
your mouth, in your hands, in your heart.
Rejoice… because here is our God!
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