The Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 14, 2013

     Do you want to be close to God?  How close?  Those may sound like silly questions because we all want to be as close as possible to God, don’t we?  Isn’t that what our life of faith is all about?  Yes, but maybe it’s not quite that simple.

     I remember visiting a parishioner in the hospital who was hovering between life and death.  It wasn’t at all clear that he was going to make it.  During our visit, I remember asking him if he was able to pray.  “It’s hard, he said, but I do pray.”  Then he added, “Do you know what my prayer is, Father?  My prayer is ‘Lord, be close to me, but not too close!’”  I think I got the point. He was certainly being honest!  We all want God to be close to us, but maybe not too close….

     Today’s readings provide some insights on the closeness of God.  In the reading from the Book of Deuteronomy Moses tells the people that they shouldn’t think of God as remote: up in the sky somewhere, or far across the sea.  No, God is close to you, Moses tells them: God has written His covenant of love – his Law – not 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 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 unfortunate preaching, gotten caught up in some erroneous thinking that denied Christ his unique role as mediator and redeemer.  They had come to regard Christ as but one among a host of distant angels or ‘super-beings’ who controlled the universe and who had to be pacified or appeased.  And St. 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!).”  But 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 his creatures!  He is “the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form.”  Now 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. For the people to whom Jesus spoke this parable, neighbors were fellow Jews – people with whom they shared the Promises.  But that wasn’t good enough for Jesus.  He wanted to bring people to a new place.  That’s what this parable is about.  It’s about stretching the concept of neighbor beyond what good and reasonable people might think acceptable and it’s about shrinking the concept of the closeness of God.

     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 puts me in mind 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: “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 a question to him (“What is written in the law?”)  The lawyer successfully answers, but 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 by telling a parable – 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: sworn enemies.  They despised each other.

     Well, the lawyer seems to have understood this bombshell of a teaching but it’s not hard, is it, to imagine that he wished he had never asked the question?

     I began by asking how close to God you want to be.  Well, no matter how we answer that question, the fact remains that God is very close to us.  God came as close as possible to us when Jesus took on our flesh and blood, and Jesus comes equally close to us in the Eucharist we celebrate - and in our neighbor - including the one we might just as soon avoid.  God is close to us.  Maybe sometimes too close for comfort?  

     Father Michael G. Ryan