Sunday reflections

Now that I am home and have new adventures to blog about, I am going to try to use this blog to record my reflections on the Sunday lectionary readings.  Your help in keeping my accountable is appreciated.

Today in the readings we hear of God’s love and deliverance in the echo of lament.  There are most certainly times when God seems absent and we are hungry for God’s love.  What are we to do?

 

In Romans 8:35-39, Paul quotes Psalm 44.  This song calls upon God to rise from apparent sleep and remember Israel in its cries of affliction.  Israel knows the stories of God’s great deeds and covenant that brought them out slavery and guides them through history.  “Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake.  Do not cast us off forever!  Why do you hide your face?” (Ps 44:23-24_“Where are you now?” Is what the Psalm writer is asking.  I have certainly asked this question myself faced with scripture stories in one hand, and my life’s challenges in the other.

 

Second Isaish ( Chps 40-55) speaks from a similar context.  Second Isaiah’s messages of encouragement and a promise of deliverance are for a specific audience: Israelites living many years into Babylonian exile.  Isaiah consoles those living under hardship with the prophecy that God still controls history, even in periods when it seems quite the opposite. 

 

In such times, How on earth!? does God “Feed us; and answer all our needs,” as the psalm today intones?  What can satisfy our hunger for home, for peace and for belonging? 

 

Although there can be plenty of doubt, All the readings today, the Hebrew Scriptures to the Christian Testament of Christ, representing thousands of years of inspired human wisdom and experience, all tell of God’s presence with us, and for us especially during times of hardship and suffering.

 

What God feeds us in these times is God’s own self.  What he receive is an ongoing relationship.  How this profound reality is communicated in tangible terms is the life and love of Jesus the Christ in the incarnation; and the continuing incarnation of Christ in the Eucharist and us – the Body of Christ.

 

Paul, answers the question of Psalm 44 in remarkable transformative metaphor:

 

            For your sake we are being killed all day long;

                        We are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered (Ps 44:22 qtd in Rm 8:36.)

 

No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly
 through him who loved us

(Rm 8:37)

 

We are conquering sheep! Through him who loves us!!!

 

Though we are persecuted, struggle and endure hardship, anything that gives us the illusion of existing separate from God does not actually do so.  Before we do or not do anything, Christ’s love, God’s love and the Spirit’s action never leave us alone.   –Paul notes this when he comments we have Christ to intercede for us from within God (Rm 8:34) as well as the Spirit “who intercedes with sighs too deep for words” from within us!!!(8:26-27).

 

And if we can’t quite take the leap of faith by Paul’s words alone, we have Matthew’s Gospel story of Christ’s action of intercession when there is need. 

 

After the death of John the Baptist and Herod Antipas’ notice of Jesus, Jesus withdraws.  Jesus was no doubt afraid.  He sought prayer and the God he called Father as a refuge.  But the Crowds followed him.  What we have here is an instance where God actually wanted to be absent!  However, he was moved with compassion to heal and further demonstrate his vision of the Kingdom to his Disciples.  He tells them:

 

There is no need for them to go away;
 give them some food yourselves (Mt 14:16).

 

What God feeds us is God’s own self in relationship.  How this profound reality is communicated in tangible terms is the life and love of Jesus the Christ in the incarnation; and the continuing incarnation of Christ in the Eucharist and in us – the Body of Christ.