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.
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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!
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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
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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!
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