“Isn’t this the son of Joseph?”: By Loving we Become Children of God
Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19; 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30
“Unity” has always been an onerous task for humanity to accept. The human person seems incurably fixated with difference rather than unity. In antiquity, there existed three stratifications of the human society: social status, gender and race. Biblical vestiges of this division includes: Jews and Gentiles, Jews and Samaritans, Jews and Greeks, slaves and free persons, male and female (Gal 3:28). In contemporary political landscape, international passports, flags and races are identity markers. Human beings are defined from what is visible, contractual and legal. The last place our society looks at for human identification is the spiritual, invisible and universal, despite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Division and exclusion trump signs of unity and commonality.
The call of Jeremiah, in the first reading, and the statement of the gospel, “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?” orient us to a different parameter of human identification, which is not in consonance with how human beings identify one another. The call of God and the fact of creation argues for a divine source of identity and a common identity for human beings. God’s solution to the problem of division and disunity is twofold: prophetism and love. “Prophets” are all those called and created by God to be the architects of unity and their mantra is the promotion of love, in unlikely places. “Prophetism” is the realization that there is an inner-person in human beings, the indwelling of God in each person, that the visible part of the human person is a signature of their creator’s image, the branding of each person for the purposes of revealing the God that remains visible through the works of human hands and in his creation.
The Spirit of God makes known to Jeremiah his eternal identity and dignity in today’s first reading. Jeremiah is made to understand that he is far more important than what is visible and definable in him by the society in which he lived. There is only one true conferrer of identity – God, and only one identity matters, that which comes from God and manifests God in human beings. By looking deep within and locating the human origin as a reflection of the divine is the only way towards unlocking the highest potential in human beings and the revelation of the human identity.
With the divine identity imprinted on human beings comes the responsibilities and duties of the human person to God and the human society. The fundamental duty to love and be loved finds its relevance and raison-d’être in the fact that only by loving can the human person be the visible presence of God on earth, and serve as the architect of unity on earth. The vocation to love is a divine vocation. “Love,” like God, only becomes visible at the point of action. Just as God’s revelation is through his creation, so do human beings reveal their maker and he who dwells within them through what they do.
It is not always easy to love because love could be refused and reciprocated by hatred. To love requires a lot of courage and determination. It is easier to say, as Jeremiah is told in the first reading, “They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, declares the Lord, to deliver you” (Jeremiah 1:19). In fact, Jeremiah will eventually ask: “Should good be repaid with evil? Yet they have dug a pit for my life. Remember how I stood before you to speak good for them to turn away your wrath from them” (Jeremiah 18:20). This clearly shows that love is divine, otherwise, loving will be an impossible task. When love is understood as sacrifice, as a daily dying to selfishness and the projection of God through positive impact on others, then Paul’s teaching on love begins to make sense.
Paul’s teaching that “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7) tells us how to manifest God in our society and be qualified as children of God. The human propensity is to love others on our own terms, and cherry pick those to love and those to hate under whatever pretext. But if “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” then we must learn from God’s magnanimity towards us in order to show love to others and avoid hating anyone. The human task on earth is to represent God and not ourselves. Ours is an ambassadorial task, carrying out the will of God in all that we do and say.
When we realize that the words spoken by Jeremiah and his prophetic vocation are all at God’s behest, then the responsibility to love and never to hate becomes clearer because the fundamental Christian vocation is the vocation to love. The prophetic spirit and vocation is the call for social and distributive justice. Above all, to offer up one’s life for the salvation of others is the peak of love and prophetism. Everyone who stands for love stands for justice because love is the revelation of God. Moreover, the concluding statement of Paul, in our second reading, becomes a motif for loving, because “Love never ends. . . . So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:8a, 13).
God’s love is ineluctable because it is larger than large. God’s grace for the salvation of souls goes beyond status, gender and ethnicity. The origin of the conflict of today’s gospel is the attempt to circumvent God’s love, to limit it to the Jews by excluding the Gentiles. The healing of a pagan leper (Na’aman) and the saving of a Sidonian widow warranted the rejection of Jesus. “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?” is spoken from the perspective of Jesus’ betrayal of his ethnicity and a preference for non-Jews, as a protest to Jesus’ stance on God’s exclusive love of the Jews. However, Jesus shows that a prophetic love goes beyond frontiers, and accepts rejection on that account: “When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong” (Luke 4:28-29).
It is when we risk to love, in order to break barriers, that we imitate God’s love. We will qualify as God’s children, when we put out lives on the line for the salvation of souls. We will enjoy God’s protection, when we accept God’s definition of the universality of human nature and human beings. Everyone, like Jeremiah, received his/her vocation from God, the vocation to prophesy love and unity; to refuse to be mastered by any definition which goes contrary to God’s divine vocation for love and unity. Indeed, the question is not “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?” but the imperative to proclaim that human beings are children of God!
Assignment for the Week:
Make somebody, especially an “outsider,” feel belong this week.