Our readings this week act as a meditation on the radical availability of God, first made visible by the relationship of the divine to the people of Israel, then evinced by God’s incarnation in the person of Jesus. Let these chapters serve as a counter to anyone who wants to argue that God is a distant, uninterested figure. To the contrary: the suggestion is that God is not only interested in, but is deeply engrossed in our lives, and that history winds toward a moment in which we’ll all be drawn back into divinity. The preparations for this reunion, we’re told, began even before we did.
In the Jeremiah reading, the metaphor of God’s people as sheep, with God as the shepherd, is used. There is divine assurance that any person who wrongs God’s people does so in a necessarily limited sense. All ills inflicted upon them are ultimately thwarted; God’s people, no matter how tried, no matter how tormented, will ultimately find their salve in being drawn back into God’s company. Via Jeremiah, God says, “I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply” (Jeremiah 23:3).
Following is the anticipation of the return of a Davidic king, a messiah who will seek justice for all God loves. These promises, in consideration of what the nation was facing, can leave one breathless at their breadth, at the seeming audacity of what they propose: it would be no small feat to collect, from all ends of the Earth, the Israelites of the Diaspora. Some sheep, some of the people, we might otherwise think, seem certain to be lost—the thought of so many, across such an expanse, and with individual wills, seems to work against the idea of total return. And yet Jeremiah assures us: each and every soul will return. All will fold back into the community which they inherently belong to—God’s community, Israel.
Colossians arises in a different historical situation, but faces, similarly, the threat of fracture: the burgeoning Christian communities are saddled with the difficult task of defining their “borders,” of determining what Christian means, who it includes and who, ultimately, it excludes. Are they a continuation of the people of Israel, a branch of that family, or something radically different, promised decidedly different relationships to God? And, a more pressing question: what happens to this delicate, still ill-defined community when it faces, wholesale, persecution from nations which won’t wait for it to define and secure itself before undermining it?
Paul is addressing communities which anticipate very real, and very potentially divisive, circumstances. And yet he assures us, as did the author of Jeremiah, that whatever happens to God’s people in the short term, in the long term they’ll all be gathered to God. Through the person of Jesus, in whom all are justified, Paul says that “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace” (Colossians 1:20).
So both books, from both testaments, assure communities which feel themselves to be God’s communities, even perhaps in an exclusive way, of their eventual total assumption into God. Yet we can’t help notice, from a critical distance, that the two communities are, in actuality, at least a little different. Does this call into question the exclusivity of either?
This perhaps leads us to an interesting realization: God undertook specific and particular relationships with these particular communities, imbued with intimacy and familial love; but the particularity of those relationships does not amount to exclusivity. Rather, that both communities are engaged, and that both engagements are real and assured, indicates that God’s particular love for us extends beyond subtle definitions: it is available to all, who can call themselves almost anything without compromising that love.
Luke finds that the relationship of Christians to God is a continuation of the covenantal relationship of God to Abraham, saying that the promises made to him were, in fact, made to us as well, and that “us” is inclusive. “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,” the Gospel says; all who are God’s, all who face the pains of humanity—in the end, a radical all (Luke 1:78). It’s therefore understandable that God is celebrated everywhere, and is manifested everywhere: “Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth” (Psalm 46:10).
Both Jeremiah and Colossians give us a correct picture of who will be gathered back to God; both could be misread as envisioning a somewhat exclusive eternity; but both actually anticipate a wider salvation, one which is available to all mankind. God’s love, manifested in special ways in the Israelite and Christian communities, isn’t given to them alone; it’s an effusive love, a ubiquitous love, one which seeks and finds all.
God’s love is radically available, and radically assured. We can note in Jeremiah that the sheep whom God shepherds don’t collect themselves back to him, necessarily; even if they stray, God collects them back, taking the care and time to seek, and find, each one. How does God know which belong to the divine, we might wonder, if we don’t yet understand that all are God’s.
But we can intuit, and assume: just as we take pride in the beautiful and unique things we do, just as we thrill in or maker’s marks upon our own works (in the corner of our paintings, in our fingerprints upon the meals we make for families and loved ones, in our names scrawled across the back of hard-earned checks), God must delight in seeing the divine light given into each and every being made by Heaven’s hand. God knows us because we are God’s; and all are God’s, regardless of individual self-identifications.
Our Gospel reading puts us at the foot of the cross. Jesus is surrounded by persecutors who revile him, and who, by his death, appear to have won. But Jesus takes pity: “forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he prays (Luke 23:24). He’s mocked, he’s cast in with criminals; he’s taunted with demands that he save even those who persecute them, if he’s so able. Jesus both answers these derisions and doesn’t.
He doesn’t address the rabid crowd directly; he prays on their behalf, though, and he anticipates their return, which is alluded to when the criminal beside him comes to the realization that Jesus is divine. To him, Jesus promises “today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). And we know, in view of all of our readings, that that “today” is as every day, just as the criminal is like every individual who has faltered and fallen down; we’re all people who haven’t exactly earned God’s love. We’re sinners, we’re fallible and imperfect; but even in our imperfections, we’re beloved, and given to anticipate paradise.
God loves radically. God invests his love in particular places; God’s love is simultaneously invested everywhere. God forges complex relationships with individuals; God seeks complex relationships with all. And when we begin to realize this, we come to understand that, if we’re ourselves like the sheep waiting to be brought back into the fold, so are the people next to us—they, too, are justified by God’s love. The light of God is in us as we love; the potential for it rests in our neighbors, too, and in their neighbors. And when God eventually calls—when the work of shepherding us back begins—the divine mark in all will come to light, and we’ll all shine in synchronicity.
God’s radical love, if it’s radically and everywhere accepted, will lead to a beauty and a harmony in creation that we can hardly anticipate.
photo credit here
No comments:
Post a Comment