29 B 2006
 

“Through his suffering, my servant shall justify many, their guilt he shall bear.”

Many are the ways one can approach God–and with varying results. God, for example, may be acknowledged as the maker of the universe with due respect for His genius and impressive power. This is GOD with all the awesomeness of His perfections. Here is that Supreme Being whom many have in mind if and when they think of God or pray to Him: this is God, as it were, from a distance.

God may also be known by Christians, as such He is the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: each or any of the three divine Persons approachable through prayer. Here we have an infinitely closer grasp of God, because this knowledge of Him as ‘three-in-one’ didn’t come from human speculation about Him but by way of a direct revelation from Christ. This Christian leverage in our understanding of God permits us to address Him as our ‘Father’ (an unheard of familiarity with divinity) and to know His Son who became man, and to know of the invisible sanctifying Holy Spirit. Christians then may pray to God simply, or as a Trinity, or to any of the three Persons singly.

Now, if I may dare say so, in each of these approaches–all valid and useful and even necessary–‘God’ is still a Being at a somewhat respectful distance. Certainly God the Father is our ‘daddy’ as Jesus called him, abba, and certainly there can be an intimacy with the Spirit dwelling in our hearts. But these are as yet invisible Persons of the God whom we cannot see. Yet it is our very desire, it’s a most human thing, to want to see, to experience, to touch and behold what we know. Was the God who made us with this very desire for human closeness not going to satisfy our craving to see Him?

Were’ told that in the beginning, Adam had familiarity with God who conversed and walked with him in the Garden. The human race–after the great sin–lost the privilege of that east access to God and was punished by banishment. What a loss! Just as any pleasurable experience seeks repetition, so the craving of mankind to be close once again to God always ached in the human heart. This desire in humanity to see God again and be close to Him was not to remain permanently frustrated. God would satisfy our yearning to know Him and see Him in a most extraordinary way: He became man. When Jesus came into the world as the Son of God who added on to Himself a human body and soul, we then could know God, see God, hear God, touch Him, adore Him and even–as would happen later–consume Him in Holy Communion. This is because God took on a face, with eyes and hands, a mouth and feet, and we could see Him and adore Him in a compressed, that is, human way. I would like to point out to you that it is the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ that has brought God so near to us. This is the warmth and the closeness to God that everyone of upright will wants to have with Him: all want to see God! And, if I may add, it is this intimacy with Jesus’ sacred humanity that you will find wherever real Catholicism is practiced. Sorry to say it, but you wont find it very well in Protestantism, or if you do, only in the degree it resembles Catholicism. In the Catholic Church you will find (or should find) not a bare cross, but a body on it; not empty decoration but windows and paintings and statues. You will find the Heart of Jesus visible in the Sacred Heart, Jesus the Divine Mercy, and many other representations of Him, of Mary and of the saints and angels. These works of artists and artisans are not idols that pagans worshiped, but representations to the mind of the greatest event in history: God taking on visibility in the incarnation. The divine–God–takes on visible form, and in Catholicism particularly, we are thus drawn in to the inner life of God–through the visibility of Jesus. And now our desire for seeing God can be satisfied.

All this has a relation to the readings of the day because they, in different ways, all refer to the Passion of our Lord. Now, there is nothing, nothing in all the world, that makes a bigger impression, that is more poignant, more intense, than suffering and pain. Even strong pleasure can’t match the degree of intensity that pain can attain.

Sometimes, you know, I ask myself, ‘why the Passion?’ Why did Jesus choose this most awful manner in which to express His love. (The primary answer, by the way, was to atone for sin.) The answer for ‘why Jesus’ Passion’ is that without the proof of pain, without the suffering of God we would not know the depth of divine love. ‘God loves everybody’ is a cliché that passes our ears but leaves our hearts rather cold. But to see, and to experience the pain and torments of Jesus, to see Him agonizing on the cross, to see a wounded heart enmeshed in thorns, to have compassion with His Passion (even in small measure)–this is to be brought to a higher level of knowing God. It is knowing God through the suffering humanity of Jesus.

Today from Isaiah: ‘The Lord crushed him in infirmity. Through his suffering, he will bear their guilt.’

The Catholic faith–which is to say Christianity–revolves around the Passion of our Savior. This is not merely a deed done and past, but–in a mystical way–a reality that continues. And why so? Because the sins of humanity have not ceased to wound and offend Him. It is for this reason that we offer the daily sacrifice of the Cross on the altar: Jesus mystically immolated in the Mass. Sins are atoned for in the that re-offering of the Passion of Jesus to God. I am reminded of this when I celebrate Mass. I am holding in my hands not a holy bread but someone’s flesh; I have a cup before me not of wine, but a cup of blood. The flesh and blood of the Son of God become man. In this lowly form I am able to be so close to God as to ‘communicate Him.’ God has been made near to me through the blood of Jesus Christ: through His sacred humanity, through His passion, through the sacrifice of the Mass.

Catholics need to wake up to the reality of their religion. If God seems remote from you, if your prayers are empty, if your Communion has no fervor about it, there is something wrong indeed. But the defect is not with God, but with you. You are not approaching God through His humanity, through the Sacred Heart, through the Passion, the wounds and afflictions of Christ, through the participation–not just of the prayers and songs of the Mass–but of the painful sacrifice of Jesus renewed in the Mass in a mystical manner. In that case, you’re not meeting God in that close encounter He has designed for you by His coming to you as man.

We have an awful lot of territory to recover in our blasé, feather-brained Catholicism that has emptied the faith of its poignancy, its fire. We need again to discover the truth of which Saint wrote: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor 5:19).

Come to Him, behold Him and adore your God.