To See Christ Be Christ
Monday: Sixteenth Week of the Year: July 18, 2016
Year II: Micah 6:1-8; Psalm 50:5-23; Matthew 12:38-42
The Responsorial
Psalm gives the key to experiencing God: “To the upright I will show the saving power of God” (Psalm 50).
Micah
6: 1-8
shows God defending himself against those who feel betrayed by him — as we
sometimes do when we have been going to church, saying our prayers, doing the
things our religion prescribes, and God permits something terrible to happen to
us. We get mad at God. We did our part; why didn’t God do his? Some people
break off relationship with God over this. If we are tempted to condemn them,
let the one who has never suffered tragic loss or pain cast the first stone!
The ultimate answer to this was given by
Jesus, who saved the world by dying on the cross and laid down the principle
from the beginning: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny
themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Jesus did not promise to
save us from suffering. When, contrary to everyone’s hopes and expectations, he
announced that this was not his mission as Messiah, Peter objected forcefully
in the name of us all, and Jesus answered just as forcefully. This is the
reason he was (and still is) rejected and crucified.1
Micah doesn’t take us this far. He just
says we cannot expect to experience the fruit of religion unless our religion
is also our deep spirituality; that
is, an ongoing interaction of mind and heart with the mind and heart of God.
Just “doing what we are told” is religion without spirituality. Micah puts
authentic response to God in a nutshell: what God requires of us is to “do
justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Doing this
intentionally, and walking consciously with God, is the way to experience God:
“To the upright I will show the saving
power of God.”
In Matthew
12: 38-42 the “scribes and Pharisees,” who made the prescriptions of the
law their preoccupation, ask Jesus to work some striking miracle as a “sign” of
his identity. We find this same phenomenon today in many people whose religion
stops short with doctrinal orthodoxy and law observance: they tend to fixate on
the latest visions, private revelations and “signs in the sky” to feed their
devotion instead of going deep into the mysteries of faith. Jesus says the one
sign he will give of his identity today is the visible presence of his life in
the members of his body on earth. They are the visible “sign of Jonah” and
proof of Christ’s resurrection. To reveal Jesus in ministry is to live and to
love on a level so divine that our behavior cannot be explained except by the
divine life of Christ within us —the sign that through Baptism we have in fact
“become Christ.” That “we abide in him and he in us.”
No one has ever
seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in
us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us
of his Spirit (1John 4:12-13).
Through “the upright” on this level God
will show the mystery of his “saving power.”
Initiative:
Give God’s life: Be a “priest in the Priest.” Reveal Christ alive in you by
expressing his love.
Footnotes:
1See Matthew 16: 21-27.
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