“O my people, what have I done to you, or how have I wearied you? Answer me!” God sounds just like a best friend with hurt feelings in today’s first reading for Mass, or a parent who feels abandoned by their children. Parents work and worry and sacrifice for their children their whole lives sometimes, and then their grown children never come to visit them or be a tangible part of their lives. It can baffle a parent who did everything within their power to be a good parent to their child, and give their child a good life, and then the child takes off as an adult and has nothing to do with them. It hurts God the same way.
In today’s first reading God is reminding the Israelite people of all that he has done, out of love for them. He brought them out of Egypt after generations of slavery. The bonds of slavery was broken solely by God’s own hand. Out of love for them, He gave them great leaders like Moses and Aaron to guide them and yet they still turned away from Him, after all He did for them.
God is not some distant deity. He is not totally foreign to us. We are made in His image and likeness. God has many of the same feelings that we do. When we relate to God, we are relating to a being like us, but He is the Divine Creator. Jesus is part human and part divine too. That is part of the reason God gave us his flesh and blood son. Yes, Jesus came for the forgiveness of our sins, but he also came because mankind could not relate to a Spirit that was not tangible. They believed in Him for a while, but they couldn’t see Him for themselves and their faith kept slipping away. God would do some drastic things to bring them back, but then they slipped away again. This happened repeatedly throughout history. Mankind believed, then fell away, believed, then fell away. It continued for thousands of years until God the Father gave us a tangible person like ourselves, who was part God and part man. His own Son.
Jesus said in today’s gospel that:
“An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah the prophet. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.”
Christ’s divinity was proven on Easter morning. No human person has ever been dead, in their grave for three full days, and rose from the dead all by themselves. He was truly the Son of the living God. He was not just a charismatic leader, or a great teacher, or a religious fanatic that wasn’t in his right mind. God was in Jesus and Jesus was in God, and the Holy Spirit came to the earth and dwelled in human flesh. No longer was God a distant Spirit, a puff of smoke or flames of fire, but a human being like us.
There could be nothing more beautiful than this. God loved us so much that He became one of us, through the birth of His son Jesus. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit’s relationship is still difficult for many people to understand but, we do understand the flesh and blood person of Jesus Christ. At least some of us do.
The Pharisees wanted substantial proof that Jesus was really the Messiah, but that could not happen until after his death. You can almost hear the exasperation in Christ’s voice in the words we read in today’s gospel. We have two choices in life. This choice is the most important decision we will ever make and it will affect us forever. Do we believe that Jesus Christ is the son of the living God? Or not?
God gave us everything He had to give, to show us that He loves us, including His very own son, and still people choose to not believe in Him. What more proof could they want? So many miracles Christ performed, the likes of which mankind has never seen before or since. Jesus’s resurrection of the dead is still being talked about to this day, over 2,000 years after the fact. This alone should carry some weight in balancing the belief vs. not belief decision we all must make during our lives.
God respects our free will though. He doesn’t force Himself on anyone. Jesus was the same way. No amount of proof or arguments seemed to make any difference in changing the Pharisees mind about him.
It hurts God, it hurts Jesus, and it hurts us, when someone close to us refuses to believe in Jesus Christ to this day. Jesus and God hurt with us, when someone we love rejects them. But, there isn’t anything they can do about it and neither can we. Freewill must be respected.
There’s always hope though, for our family members or friends who have turned from God or do not believe in Jesus. God never gave up on us and He will never give up on our loved ones. Some of the Pharisees did turn and accept Christ, and the good thief did in the last moments of his life too. It is possible for God’s grace to soften their hearts. He doesn’t ask much from us. Like the last sentence of the first reading for mass, this is all He requires of us:
“Only to do the right and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Daily Mass Reading:
Micah / Psalm 50 / Matthew 12: 38-42
