Who lives next door to you? Across the street? I don’t mean what are their names. I mean WHO are they? What are their interests and their favorite things? What great troubles have they had? What do they consider their victories? For what do they yearn? What is important enough to them that they would give their lives for it?
And who are we? Likely, a fair number of people could name some of our interests and favorite things. Those who have known us for years could remember our great troubles and guess at what would seem to be our victories. But only those who have known us intimately would be able to accurately surmise what we yearn for so much that we would give our lives to obtain it.
Those special souls would know us intimately. What is intimacy? I love a definition we use in marriage education: intimacy is “into me, see.”
On this celebration of the Most Holy Trinity, the readings today give us an “into me, see” look at God. They describe who God is.
Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9
In his book, Delivered into Covenant, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann describes verse 6 of the first reading today as “God’s full self-disclosure.” The setting is a great crisis. God led the people out of Egypt with great signs and wonders. They crossed the Red Sea as if on dry land and came to Mt. Sinai. There, God called Moses up on the mountain and gave him the 10 Commandments, as well as many lesser laws. God said, in effect, “If you are to be my people, this is how you shall live.”
But then, Moses stayed so long on the mountain with God that the people grew impatient, scared of this God who was clearly alive and real—who maybe wanted a lot from them in return for their freedom from slavery. The people decided to use some of the gold the Egyptians had given them to make a golden calf. The golden calf would be their god. That would be a god they could worship, but who would not disappear on them, demand of them, or possibly destroy them. It would be a god they created—so they could be in control of it.
God was furious! At first, he said, in effect, “OK. You can go across the Sinai Peninsula back to Canaan, but since you don’t want to follow me, I will not go with you. You are on your own.” Moses pleaded with God. God answered and said today’s reading: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.”
Our reading today leaves out that very last part. It refers to what God meant for the Israelites at that time: God would go with them to the Promised Land, but the people were going to have to wait forty years to get there.
Brueggemann describes this full disclosure of who God is as ALL ABOUT RELATIONSHIP. “We are given what will become the normative inventory of divine attributes, all of which are intensely and primarily relational. This cluster of terms suggests that YHWH’s primary propensity is to make and live in covenant. It goes without saying (and so goes unsaid) that YHWH is powerful. (p 92)
So, our first reading today gives us an “into me, see,” very personal look at God: God is powerful and has standards which he expects to be lived—yet his nature is one of mercy, graciousness, and faithfulness. He seeks to share his nature in a committed relationship with us ordinary humans, i.e, by love.
It is to be a covenant relationship, with expectations of us people. God is forgiving, but there are learning curves when we wander away from his expectations.
II Corinthians 13:11-13
In the second reading, Paul pretty much describes the same covenant requirements for the Christians of Corinth: “Mend your ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you.”
These final verses of II Corinthians finish a letter which is filled with both encouragement for what is good in the fledgling community and correction for behaviors that are not in conformity with God’s ways. He tells the Corinthians they are to be “temples of the Living God”. They are not to worship idols or stray off the path. In Chapter 6 of the letter, Paul actually quotes from Exodus at the struggle we have in the first reading. Paul is calling on the Holy Spirit to help the Corinthians live in God’s ways.
Nothing new under the sun! God sets standards, and people struggle to live by them.
John 3:16-18
Our readings today finish with the beautiful description of who God is in John 3:16. “For God SO LOVED the world that he gave his only Son.” God did not, does not hate the world he created. He LOVES it. As we intimately see God in these verses, we see God yearns to live with US ALL. He yearns for it so much that he came to earth, joining God and man in Jesus, to make it possible for us to do what the Israelites were not quite able to do: live in God’s ways.
John today says “everyone.” Vatican II emphasized in multiple documents, but especially in Gaudium et Spes that God call us, his people, to spread his desire for covenant to ALL, to everyone. God yearns, still, and gives, still—through us.
Yet, God’s desire for relationship remains a desire for a covenant relationship—a desire that we, God’s people today, live by the standards of God’s covenant.
What? You say. John 3:16 says BELIEVE. Believe means accept intellectually and trust. Believe doesn’t mean LIVE—does it?
Applications
Believe does mean LIVE, because of the “obedience of faith.” The Catechism says,
142 By his Revelation, “the invisible God, from the fullness of his love, addresses men as his friends, and moves among them, in order to invite and receive them into his own company.” The adequate response to this invitation is faith.
143 By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God.2 With his whole being man gives his assent to God the revealer. Sacred Scripture calls this human response to God, the author of revelation, “the obedience of faith”
Obedience of faith is what the Israelites had to learn before they could claim their Promised Land. Obedience of faith is what the Corinthians had to learn. It is what we need to learn today.
Polarities within Church and world pick and choose what obedience of faith includes.
Looking at the history of God’s revelation, for us today, I believe obedience of faith includes obedience to the 10 Commandments. Obedience of faith also includes presenting them to others in gentler ways but without diminishing their requirements as God revealed in the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus. AND obedience of faith includes Catholic Social Teaching that we live in ways that foster flourishing of ALL peoples in ALL places, for ALL are included in John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that everyone might not perish, but have eternal life.”
As I “into me, see” God today, I both tremble and am excited. I tremble because it is so easy to get pulled into a polarity that only sees part of what God’s covenant includes—the part I want to match my behavior to.
I am excited, because, difficult as it is to match all of what God asks, God still extends an invitation to us to travel in his company, to live by his standards, and to change the world—beginning with ourselves.
Prayer:
God, You know how troubled I am at times about trying to live by ALL of Your Word. Yet living by ALL of Your Word is a path of many saints. Keep me on Your path. Lead me, guide me, Lord.
