No other religion has a God so near

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Is 53:10-11 
Second Reading: Heb 4:14-16 
Gospel Reading: Mk 10:35-45

The Church’s Fourth Eucharistic Prayer, addressed to God the Father, sums up the whole history of our salvation. “You formed man in your own image and entrusted the whole world to his care, so that in serving you alone, the Creator, he might have dominion over all creatures.

“And when through disobedience he had lost your friendship, you did not abandon him to the domain of death ...

“And you so loved the world ... that in the fullness of time you sent your only begotten Son to be our Saviour. Made incarnate by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary, he shared our human nature in all things but sin ...

“To accomplish your plan, he gave himself up to death, and, rising from the dead, he destroyed death and restored life.”

We may have heard this prayer so often that we take it for granted. This Sunday, let us meditate on it.

We address God, the supreme Spirit, who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections; who had no beginning and will have no end; and who is utterly holy, totally other, incomprehensible, absolute, almighty, all-powerful, all-knowing, and absolutely majestic.

We assert that God created us out of love, in friendship with himself, but that we disobeyed him and lost his friendship. Thus we became subject to Satan, who thenceforth exercised the power of death over us. However, God continued to love us, so much that “to ransom a slave, He gave away his Son,” as the Church says in her Easter Exsultet.

Like God the Father, his Son has the nature of God, but he became a man, one of his own creatures. By nature, he was “first” among us, but he became the “slave of all.” Although he was God, he “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many,” as he says in the Gospel Reading.

“It was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain,” says the First Reading: to “make his life an offering for sin.” Jesus, the high Priest, sacrificed himself, the perfect Victim, to his Father, as an offering for our sins.

Now, says the Second Reading, he lives forever in heaven to make intercession for us with his Father. Therefore, “let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

Had God not revealed all this, we would find it incredible. There is no parallel in any human religion. Neither Buddha, nor Socrates, nor Mohammed, nor Confucius, nor any other leader in any other religion ever claimed to be God.

As we hear in this Sunday’s Psalm, “the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord”; our souls “wait” for him, using him as “our help and our shield.” No other religion has a God so near, so approachable, so loving, or so lovable.

In his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope St. John Paul II said, “In a certain sense, God has gone too far” in stooping down to us. Hence the heresies which surfaced after his Ascension.

On the one hand, it is hard to accept that God is so human. To Jews and Muslims, for example, God remains “absolutely transcendent,” “pure majesty.”

On the other hand, it is hard to accept that the man Jesus is fully God. We Catholics see him looking like a piece of bread, and forget that he is the one through whom God the Father made all things, “visible and invisible.” We hear him whispering forgiveness in the privacy of the confessional, and we forget that the one we have offended is “the Holy One of God.”

This Sunday, as we see both sides of the coin, “let us hold fast” to our belief that God has indeed become Man.

Father Hawkswell teaches a free course on the Catholic faith every Monday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at St. Anthony’s Parish,  2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver, and again from 7 to 9 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way (just off 33rd Avenue between Oak and Cambie). Everyone is welcome, Catholic or non-Catholic.