If we deny God, there is no one else to turn to

12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Jer 20:7, 10-13
Second Reading: Rom 5:12-15
 Gospel Reading: Mt 10:26-33 

“You have overpowered me,” Jeremiah cried to God.

“Behind and before you besiege me,” the psalmist said. “O where can I go from your Spirit, or where can I flee from your face?”

Even the hairs on our heads are all counted, Jesus said.

However, St. Paul called what God has done for us a “free gift.”

Do we have to accept God, or are we free to reject him?

“All men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and his Church, and to embrace it and hold on to it as they come to know it,” said Vatican II. However, “nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will,” for “the act of faith is of its very nature a free act.”

God leaves us free to reject him, but he employs every means short of coercion to “entice” us to him.

Pope St. John Paul II said that in Christianity, unlike other religions, man does not simply seek God. Rather, God comes “in person to speak to man of himself and to show him the path by which he may be reached.”

All too often, our response to God’s “enticement” is to run away. “I fled him,” said Francis Thompson in his poem The Hound of heaven. “I hid from him.”

C.S. Lewis said that just before God “closed in” on him, his life became like the last moves in a chess game. “Soon I could no longer cherish the illusion that the initiative lay with me,” he said. “My adversary began to make his final moves.”

We ask questions, and God responds clearly, St. Augustine said. However, not everyone hears the answer clearly. “You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you …. Created things kept me from you.”

We run from God even though we know he loves us. “I was sore adread lest, having him, I must have naught beside,” Thompson explained. He compared himself to a child who, struggling in his mother’s arms, cries peevishly, “Why do you so clasp me and draw me to your knee? Forsooth, you do but chafe me; I pray you let me be! I will be loved but now and then – when it liketh me!”

God has revealed how we can reach perfect happiness. This truth compels us, winning us over with “gentleness,” but also with “power,” said Vatican II.

Before they fell, Adam and Eve were “certainly free,” Pope John Paul said, for they could “understand and accept God’s commands.” Moreover, their freedom was “extremely far-reaching,” for they could eat from most of the trees in the garden. However, it was not unlimited: God forbade them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for they could not decide good and evil for themselves.

Humans must accept God’s law, Pope John Paul said, for it is “precisely in the acceptance of that law” that “human freedom finds its authentic and complete fulfillment.” Only God knows perfectly what is good for us: his commandments are his loving way of telling us.

Nevertheless, God leaves us free to accept or reject him. Like a discreet and sensitive acquaintance, he acknowledges us publicly only if we acknowledge him; if we prefer not to know him, he does not force his acquaintance on us – but, in turn, denies knowing us.

However, if we deny God, there is no one else to turn to. “I am God,” he says; “there is no other.” As George MacDonald put it, he says, “You must be happy with my happiness and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you.”

Whatever decision we make, we will find, at our judgement, when Christ acknowledges or denies us before his Father, that to be recognized by him was all we ever really wanted.