Can you handle a God this human?

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Wis 11:22-12:2
Second Reading: 2 Thes 1:11-2:2
Gospel Reading: Lk 19:1-10

In comparison with God, the whole of creation “is like a speck that tips the scales, and like a drop of morning dew that falls on the ground,” says this Sunday’s First Reading. Like any creator, God loves what he has created: “Lord, You love all things that exist.”

However, God loves us not just as an artisan loves what he creates, but as a father loves his children. Like a father, he corrects us so that we “may be freed from wickedness” and put our trust in him, says the First Reading. We have confidence that he will “make us worthy of his call,” St. Paul says in the Second Reading. He sent his own Son as a man, Jesus, “to seek out and to save what was lost,” we hear in the Gospel.

“Could God go farther in his stooping down, in his drawing near to man?” Saint John Paul II asks in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope. “In truth, it seems that he has gone as far as possible. He could not go further.”

“In a certain sense,” he “has gone too far!” the Pope adds. Christ addressed God as “Abba – Father” and revealed him in himself. Those who heard and saw him began to protest, for they could not “tolerate such closeness.”

First the Jews protested, and then the Muslims. “Neither can accept a God who is so human,” the Pope says. God must remain “absolutely transcendent,” “pure Majesty,” they claim.

Jesus revealed God in “his intimate life,” in “his mystery,” the Pope says. In a certain way, this obscured God in the eyes of humans, for we do “not want to be pervaded and overwhelmed” by God’s nearness.

How true that is! If we even begin to realize how much God has done for us in becoming human so that we can become divine, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, we cannot help but respond to him. We cannot ignore him: we can only love him or reject him.

By his self-revelation, “the invisible God, from the fullness of his love, addresses men as his friends, and moves among them, in order to invite and receive them into his own company,” says the Catechism. “The adequate response to this invitation is faith.”

“By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God,” it says. “With his whole being man gives his assent to God the Revealer.” Sacred Scripture calls this response “the obedience of faith.”

“Faith is a personal act – the free response of the human person to the initiative of God,” the Catechism goes on. “But faith is not an isolated act. No one can believe alone, just as no one can live alone.” We have not given ourselves faith any more than we have given ourselves life. We have “received faith from others and should hand it on to others.”

“It is the Church that believes first,” the Catechism says. “It is through the Church that we receive faith and new life” in baptism. “Salvation comes from God alone; but because we receive the life of faith through the Church, she is our mother. Because she is our mother, she is also our teacher in the faith.”

The Church guards “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints,” the Catechism says. “She guards the memory of Christ’s words; it is she who from generation to generation hands on the apostles’ confession of faith.

“As a mother who teaches her children to speak and so to understand and communicate, the Church our mother teaches us the language of faith in order to introduce to us the understanding and the life of faith.”

Catholics in England used to bid each other goodbye with the words “Keep the faith.” This Sunday, let us pray this fervently, for the Church, ourselves, and each other.