24th Sunday Year B (13/09/2015)
(Isaiah 50:5-9a – James 2:14-18 – Mk 8:27-35)
God is a person – Christ Jesus – to be loved in our Neighbors!
The Flemish theologian, Edward Schillebeeckx, radicalized Catholic Sacramentology – the understanding of sacraments – with his book, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God. We approached the divine from “thing mentality” rather than relationships and personalism. But God is a person – Christ Jesus – and not a thing! We need to encounter him. When do, an “encounter” frees God from being a thing and makes him a person we meet and relate with; in fact, he is a human person who seeks and cherishes communion with human beings – Christ is God and man!
In order to make relationship with himself accessible, God creates a possibility for himself to encounter, meet and share his life with human beings when he decided that “sin,” the human incapacitation for constant fidelity, will not be a militating barrier between him and his creatures. Being a proactive God, he puts machinery in motion to seek out his creatures, you and me, for an opportunity to encounter and share our realities with us.
God’s encounter with us begins with a promise. Today’s first reading begins this way – “The Lord God opens my ear that I may hear” (Isaiah 50:1). Today, we “hear” as well as “see” the migration plagues and Islamic insurgencies, not forgetting territorial and economic imperialism of our times. The addressees of Isaiah were not so lucky because their technological know how excluded seeing, they were invited to hear – because our God gives good tidings and news, in the form of a promise, then he concretizes and realizes his promise. The promise of God is God becoming one of us in order to save us!
Yes, Isaiah – meaning “God is Salvation” – announces that “sin” does not separate the Divine and humans forever; God brings about a new kind of relationship – forgiveness and mercy, also known as salvation! Indeed, Isaiah announces a future universal amnesty for every sinner, which includes you and me. An amnesty proclaimed and procured at the cost of a human life and blood, that of Christ!
Human life and blood? That’s correct! In case you are scandalized, you are not the first to be scandalized by that way of doing things, given the quantity of lives lost and blood shed in our times. You know what, Peter too was shocked – “Then Peter took him [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke him” (Mk 8:27-35). Who can blame Peter for wanting to save a life, after a prediction of an imminent death? Peter’s was a hasty reflex and not well thought through, though – he did not hear the promise of Isaiah 50, the realization of which changes the meaning both of death and the shedding of blood: it is a blood of ransom, in accordance with God’s plan! To save humanity from sin, God planned and announced salvation to come through the death of Christ.
The good news is “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mk 8:27-35). Today’s gospel makes Christ the fulfillment of God’s promise of salvation via the death of Christ. In Christ was a scripted plan of God, which Christ acted out faithfully. Likewise, every human life is a sacred history, written into the core of each human being by God. Every single day is an unfolding of this divine script in the eventualities and crosses of life. To say a “script” is to say a “purpose” – there is no purposeless life; life is worth living when its divine purpose is understood and embraced!
For a Christian, the purpose of life is to be a free agent of love every single day. Obviously, the question is how? The answer is provided in the second reading of today “So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:14-18). The conclusion that “God is love” is arrived at because Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures. We will, in our turn, be Christians when we show love to one another. Yes, “faith alone” takes us back to a conception of a sleeping-thing-like God, but love in action, charity, enables peoples to encounter a living and active God, in an apparently dehumanized and atheistic world. The special welcome accorded refugees, in some European countries, brings God alive again. Indeed, God comes alive and we encounter him in every charitable action. “Charity” to one another is our show of appreciation to the God who loves us and sent his Christ to die for us. In every encounter with our brothers and sisters, especially the needy ones, we meet Christ and we owe him love and charity.
It is a fact: God is love! But the question remains: you and I, who are we? You and I will define ourselves through our actions – get up and do something good today! Do not be deaf to all the situations around you that call for your charitable acts! Indifference is ungodly, LOVE is the essence of God, and you and I are created for love and compassion!