3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time January 24, 2016 4PM & 10 AM Liturgies J.A. Loftus, S.J. Our scriptural bounty overflows today. We have not one, or even two, but all three readings of remarkable depth, insight and beauty. Each in its own way is a poignant and moving piece of what it means to have inherited God’s Promise to Israel and to the Church. God Promise is an extraordinary promise (“I will be with you always until the end of time.”). But we are reminded today that that Promise is not without its puzzles, its dark moments and its profound mystery. Let me ask you some questions that are often scary for me. Have you ever felt abandoned? Completely isolated? Perhaps even from your friends, your colleagues, your family? Have you ever felt lost? Like you are just wandering around without much direction? Have you ever wondered, perhaps in lonely moments, what the point of all this really is? I mean your life itself. Do you have or sense a purpose in it all? Is there something we are “supposed” to be doing with our lives? Have you ever even found yourself filling up with tears wondering about it all? If you answered, “yes” to any of the above, these readings may be just “made” for you! Men and women have been wondering about this stuff for thousands of years. And it won’t seem to go away. Listen again to the book of Nehemiah. More than five hundred years before Christ, Israel has its sacred city destroyed. Solomon’s temple is left in ashes, and those who are not slaughtered outright, are carried off to Babylon as captives. They are all exiles, refugees, and they languish there for over 50 years. Most have lost their language, their culture, and their religion. God is nowhere to be seen or felt. They are exiles from all that they cherished for years on end. God’s Promise seems so hollow now, so empty, and so barren. As Psalm 137 put it, “By the waters of Babylon we sat and wept.” Those weeping today are not alone. But finally, Babylon itself is toppled. And the new king, Cyrus, releases the few thousand Israelites who desire to try to rebuild their lives. With Ezra, their scribe, teacher, priest, they trek for months through the barren desert in caravans back to where they remembered Jerusalem had been. 2 By the year 518 or so, Ezra had finally re-built the walls of the city and erected the beginnings of a new Temple. And today he gathers all the people by the walls of the new city, stands on an elevated platform, and reads slowly and carefully—for the first time in ages, and in a language most no longer understood, Hebrew—he reads the words of God’s Promise again. It is Torah he reads. And again today’s scripture says, “the people were weeping,” but this time for joy. This is the God of the Promise who—despite all appearances to the contrary—says again God will never abandon them. And a new era has begun for Israel. Sometimes weeping is the only appropriate response to God, I guess. Five hundred years later, another Jewish man enters a synagogue and he too unfolds a papyrus and stands before the people to read. His words come from the prophet Isaiah (most likely written during that earlier Babylonian captivity). The Promise he reads is the same. But this man has the audacity to suggest—no, to say bluntly—that today the Promise is fulfilled in their hearing. In their hearing! In our hearing! 3 And another new era for Israel is born. But this time, not just for Israel but for everybody on the face of the earth. No one excluded! And yet, the people still wait. The Promise does not seem complete, does it? They wait and wonder. Some doubt. And as we will hear in next week’s gospel, some get angry about it all (all the waiting) and they want to throw Jesus off a cliff. Fifty years or so later, we hear our second reading from St Paul. He explains what everybody’s purpose is in waiting. It is to actually accomplish what Jesus predicts in his synagogue: to feed the hungry, to visit the prisoners, to clothe the naked, to make peace with justice for all nations. Why and how can they do this? Because in the new era, these people, the ones waiting, us: we are the continuing Body of Christ in this world. St. Paul does not use the language of simile, nor the language of metaphor. He speaks not symbolically but ontologically. “You are the Body of Christ.” We are not linked symbolically in some vague and “mystical” way. We are the Body of Christ! That’s what we are here for: to be Christ for each other. Yes, we are still weeping. Yes, we still feel alone, deserted, abandoned at times. Yes, we still have to wait to see God’s Promise evolve in our own 4 church and in our own time. But we are with each other. It needn’t be all that bad! No one is alone in this. I beat Ezra by several hours. And, yes, I expect you to be grateful for that. But I also pray that all of us, even in our moments of loneliness and isolation, even with our occasional tears, even wondering what it’s all really about, can hear somewhere in our own hearts that eternal Promise of God. And I hope even more that each one of us can help Jesus’ Promise be real. We are his Body, after all. Peace! 5