“The Lord
is God in the heavens above and on the earth below.” That’s what Moses has to say to his
people. They’ve been rescued by God from
slavery in Egypt, they’ve encountered him and received the Law on the mountain,
they’ve wandered the wilderness led by him, and now they stop on the plains
before crossing the water into the Promised Land, and listen to Moses, who
proclaims to them: “The Lord is God in the heavens above and on the earth
below.” And he proclaims it, because it
matters. I think we’re probably on board
with God being God in heaven; it’s God on earth we might be disquieted by. The idea that God, while totally incomparable
to any finite, fallible, created thing, enters into our world, acts, concerns
Himself intimately with each one of us, with our greatest triumphs, with the
most mundane pieces of daily life, and with our sin, our hunger, our weakness
and our need… it’s almost too much to bear.
God loved Israel so much he wanted to make them His own, and he loves us
the same. That changes everything, and that’s
not always comfortable. He offers us a
mutual binding: he’ll commit to us, and He longs for us to commit to Him. He’ll lead us, to the Promised Land; that’s
an invitation for us: to follow.
He
longs so much for us to follow that he sent his only Son, that we might see
what divine love looks like in human form.
In our Gospel, we read of a bunch of disciples who get it; they respond
to the appearance of Christ, after the resurrection, with worship. They get that he is worthy of all
praise. But, they still doubt. They simply can’t comprehend a love so
intense, so powerful, that not even death could keep the lover from his
beloved, not his death, from which he rose, not our death, from which he’ll
raise us; that an incomparable love like that would bother itself with us. But it does.
They doubt, and that’s not an intellectual skepticism, but a nervous
wavering. One of the most important
words of this gospel, so often rushed over to get to other, also important
words, is “approached.” Jesus approached
them. He doesn’t remain distant. Jesus approaches his nervous wavering
Church. Jesus never tires of approaching
us when we waver.
And
that invitation into God’s Promised Land is given a new, more vibrant hew, in
Jesus’ words: through baptism, we enter into the name of the Father, and of the
Son and of the Holy Spirit – we enter into God’s own divine life! Water, that most mundane of things, that
takes up two-thirds of the earth’s surface, becomes a means of entering not
just a physical Promised Land, but the promise of life, the divine loving life
that binds Father, Son and Spirit, itself.
With Christ, we can call upon our God as Abba Father, and rely on his
care. In our common adoption as sons and
daughters, we find a new union with Christ, God with us, and our brother. And we find the Holy Spirit joining with our
spirit, God dwelling within us, and praying with us and for us in sighs too
deep for words.
In
this baptism, these children, already gifts from God, will be claimed as His
own children. They will start on that
journey of discipleship, being taught everything Christ has taught us, not in
order to be better informed, but conformed to Christ. Walking in Jesus’ footsteps, with Jesus by
their side, with their parents, godparents, family, friends, godbrothers and
sisters… all pointing out that presence; ever-growing in likeness to Jesus
their brother, walking into the divine life which God promises us.
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