By Fr Antony Christy, SDB –
August 30, 2020: 22nd Sunday in Ordinary time
Jeremiah 20: 7-9; Romans 12:1-2; Matthew 16: 21-27
Where is God amidst all the confusion we are in? Disease, death, depression and desolation – where is God in all these?
Who is God? Can we not have everything turned to normal in a minute, by God? Is not God capable of it?
Why should there be a God, when things are so out of control? There is disease on one side, violence on another, conspiracies on yet another, selfish schemings and inhuman manipulations all over. Why should I believe in a God, then?
These are some of the questions raised these days universally. The Word today, does not answer them…but they point to us how faulty these questions are! How these are to be made sense of…all within a relationship, because our God is not a power that protects, nor a principle which governs. Yes, our trust and our belief is not in a power or in a principle which is called God, but in a Person… in three persons…who reveal themselves to us. In acknowledging that revelation and accepting it, we grow in a relationship called faith. The Word today presents to us, a God relates to us.
An Encountering God
We have an encountering God, a God who meets us on our everyday journey, intercepts our daily routine, and comes up with questions and proposals that demand our utmost attention. Not just questions that take an answer, but questions that lead to life choices, radical commitments and fundamental stands.
God created everything and found it good; God created human persons and found them very good! God gave them the gift of freedom, capacity to love, strength to forgive and the virtue of being good…in short, God created them in God’s own image! But soon the human persons started using these, rather misusing these, towards selfishness, vengeance, hatred and thus gave into slavery! Consequences followed: unhappiness, wretchedness, wickedness and all such curses. Human persons found ways and means of making their own live and existence more and more miserable… God encountered the human persons; they refused to listen to God. God still continues to encounter humanity; humanity refuses to heed. They have set a norm for themselves and would love to conform to it, ruining themselves and everyone around! Is it not time to conform to the call of the Lord and seek “what is good, what God wants and what is the perfect thing to do!” (Rom 12:2).
An Enchanting God
If only we pay heed to the Lord who seeks us, in that encounter and in the ways that God reveals Godself to us, God is ever enchanting. Sometimes when God encounters we are so mesmerised, enticed and gripped by the experience that, we make decisions, we make choices which otherwise we would not have made at all. God overpowers us, complains Jeremiah today. Yes, God overpowers us with love, with God’s love.
Amidst all the crisis that we are living in today, if only we truly allow the Lord to encounter us, God would enchant us. God would give us the light to see things from a different perspective – a perspective of beholding the gift that we are to each other, a perspective of looking at the entire humanity as our common identity, a perspective to treat this universe as our common home, a perspective to understand life in all its completeness without absolutising its material dimension…in short it would leave us mesmerised, in a state of enlightenment that makes sense of everything in terms of relationship, true, authentic and genuine relationships.
An Empowering God
It is when we come out of that mesmerised state, we realise what we have done…that we have fallen for God, fallen in love with that wonderful person and given our word for so many things that are so difficult in our world today: a world with such warped, strange, queer and sometimes nauseating principles, policies and priorities. A prolonged commitment seems an impossibility, a tough enroute to happiness seems an impracticality, selfless love and sensitive hearts seem an unavailable commodity.
But God empowers… God empowers us with encouragements and at the same time corrections, as we see in Jesus’ conversation with Peter. We shall meet with tough situations and we would have to respond to trying demands, but the Lord would be with us to guide us through. We would face situations that we cannot understand or explain, but we would feel the strength to live through them, until we reach that state in life where we would be able to look back and observe the whole picture, and see the Lord standing by all the time and walking along all the way. It may look like the Lord is chiding – as Jesus calls Peter Satan today; but it is just the relationship that we have with God – who cares for us and empowers us in every way.
It is only through God’s empowering love that we can know, choose and hold on to what is Good, what is acceptable and what is perfect… only through that love, the love of a God who relates!
Fr Antony Christy is a Salesian Priest from 2005, who has a Masters in Philosophy (specialisation in Religion) and a Masters in Theology (Specialisation in Catechetics). He is currently pursuing his doctoral research in Theology at Salesian Pontifical University, Rome. Walking with the Young towards a World of Peace and Dialogue is the passion that fires him.