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Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
I remember some years ago visiting a parishioner in the hospital who was quite seriously ill. He was hovering between life and death and it wasn’t at all clear that he was going make it. During one of our visits, I remember asking him if he was able to pray. “Oh, yes, I can pray, he told me,” and then he added, “Do you know what my prayer is, Father? My prayer is ‘Lord, be close to me, but not too close!’” Not a bad prayer, I thought, and certainly an honest one! We all want God to be close to us, but not too close…. I thought of my friend when I read today’s readings. In their own way, they’re all about the closeness of God. In the reading from the Book of Deuteronomy Moses tells the people not to think of God as far away: up in the sky or far across the sea. No, God is close to you, he tells them: God has written His covenant of love – his Law – not just on stone tablets but right in your hearts. But recall that Moses was speaking these words to a people who could rather enjoy a certain distance from God. They probably weren’t all that different from you and me in that they often liked to have it both ways. They enjoyed their privileged status as God’s chosen people, yes, but when push came to shove, they liked to keep their distance from God -- for the freedom it seemed to bring. Sound familiar? Much of the Book of Deuteronomy was Moses’ attempt to get the people to understand that God’s law – God’s presence -- was a gift, not a burden, and that the way to true freedom was to make a choice to accept that gift. But as with us, so with them: some gifts can come too close for comfort – which may be another way of saying that God can come too close for comfort…. The reading from the letter to the Colossians addresses this issue of the closeness of God in a very theological way. The Colossians had, through some poor preaching, gotten caught up in some erroneous thinking that denied Christ his unique role as mediator and redeemer. They thought Christ was but one among a host of distant angels or super-beings who controlled the universe and who had to be pacified or appeased. And Paul said: Nonsense. Christ is unique and all-powerful, infinitely above the angels. “He is the very image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creatures. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created, things visible and invisible (including those angelic beings you are so enamored of!).” And then Paul went on to make a powerful statement about the closeness of God. In Christ, he says, God is not only close to his creatures, he is one with them! He is “the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form.” I ask you, how much closer could God possibly be than that! The gospel parable of the Good Samaritan tells us of yet another way in which God is close to us – again, maybe too close for comfort. The startling and unsettling message of this favorite among the parables is that God is as close to us as our neighbor. But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He redefines neighbor. The people to whom Jesus spoke this parable thought of neighbors as fellow Jews – people with whom they shared the Covenant. But that wasn’t good enough for Jesus. He wanted to bring people to a whole new place. That’s what this parable is about. It’s about broadening the concept of neighbor and it’s about shrinking the concept of God’s closeness. Notice how gently and skillfully Jesus goes about getting this teaching across. He’s the perfect rabbi in this story. He answers a question by posing another -- which reminds me of one of Woody Allen’s little routines. Someone comes up to a rabbi and asks, “Why do you rabbis always answer a question with another question?” To which the rabbi replies: “And why shouldn’t we?!” In today’s gospel a lawyer poses a question to
Jesus (“Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”). And Jesus
answers by posing another (“What is written in the law?”) And when the
lawyer successfully answers that, he has a follow-up question as lawyers often
do (“And who is my neighbor?”) To answer that, Jesus, good rabbi that he
is, avoids a direct answer and tells a parable instead – a parable that gives
the lawyer an answer he couldn’t possibly have anticipated or wanted. Your
neighbor is not who you think. Your neighbor is not just the friendly
fellow next door. Or the occasional stranger in need. Or even the
Gentile of good will. Your neighbor is also the person you don’t like –
including your sworn enemy. For that is what Samaritans and Jews were to
each other. I began with the little story of my sick friend and his prayer, “Lord, be close to me, but not too close.” The fact, of course, is that God is always close to us. At a moment in time, God came totally close to us in Jesus, the Word made flesh, and ever since then, Jesus has been hiding in human flesh, including the human flesh of our neighbor – the neighbor we love and the neighbor we find it hard to love. That’s how close God is to us. Maybe too close for comfort? Father Michael G. Ryan |
