THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 

Isaiah 8:23—9:3 | 1 Corinthians 1:10-13, 17 | Matthew 4:12-23

Almighty, everliving God, direct our actions according to your good pleasure that in the name of your Beloved Son we may abound in good works. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

WEEK after week we come together at this point in the program when I’m asked to do something for you and for me. How can I open your eyes and lead you out of darkness?  How can I share with you something you already know deep inside that was placed there by God, that was lost, in a sense, because of this strange thing we call sin, original sin, a choice on the part of human nature to try to live on our own terms, in our own ways, using simply our own strength? How do I work with that image and then this image of God, who comes into our life and reveals a secret, a mystery that he is inviting us to live? And so what I do is I just ponder and wonder and think about these things over and over. I’ve been doing this for so many years. Something is bound to come through that’s clear, and I hope I can share it with you.

I think it’s in this particular set of readings: the Old Testament is a very fascinating book, and it’s so important for us to understand it, and we haven’t spent that much time as a church pondering the Old Testament, because we didn’t usually have an Old Testament reading on Sundays.  It started just 50 years ago, yet the church is more than 2,000 years old.  But we who listen to this liturgy, the word that the Catholic Church and many churches use every week, we continue to listen to these Old Testament stories, and we wonder sometimes about this God who seems to be so different than Jesus at times.  He seems tough.  He seems often irritated, angry, vindictive, demanding, short-tempered, all of that. So what do we make of this time when God was working with people in a way that seemed confusing to us who know the fullness of the story?  And the only way to understand it is to know that this God revealed himself slowly, and he started with the image that he was like the other gods, and so he was very much like the gods that were around him.  But story after story, slowly, slowly, you begin to realize that this God of Israel is different from the pagan gods, and every now and then, he’ll slowly show a side of him that makes them wonder, “Could this be a better God?  Could this be the God I want to worship?”  Because that’s the fundamental core of the Old Testament, God entering into human history and saying, “You all have believed in gods forever, but I want to reveal myself as a different kind of God than you could ever have imagined.”  And so we begin to see this God revealing himself in stages.  

Now, the easiest way to look at those stages is to look at the way we understand who God is, the Trinity, because basically, when you look at the Old Testament, you look at a God who, as a powerful God, promises to take care of these people, to fight off their enemies, to make them safe, and he would do that if they would simply worship him.  But worshipping him was more than just giving him honor and glory, but eventually he made it clear that, “What I want you to do is follow a law.” So the Old Testament is God slowly revealing himself and then giving one major gift: the law.  It’s 10 simple laws, three that deal with how human beings are designed to work with something greater than themselves, a God, how he operates, and then how we operate with each other.  So we have this law, and so people are asked to follow it. And if they don’t follow it, he pulls away his protection, and they start to fail, and their enemies take over. So in a sense, one of the major things that the God of the Old Testament did was convince the human race that he was a God who could make them safe.  So eventually, you understand that God is the God.  When we worship him, we will always be safe.  Nothing can harm us.  

Then comes Jesus, a manifestation of God in the human form, and we learn that there’s something else about this God that’s unique.  Not only does he teach us and show us what to do, but he also reveals himself as one who wants to enter into us, one who dwells within us.  And the only way he can do that is to stop the insanity of our trying constantly to follow every letter of the law, because we never can do it.  We’re always failing.  We always make mistakes.  We continue to sin. If sin is the core of what life is about, meaning if we focus on it and say, “If I stop doing that, then I’ve done everything I need to,” that’s not enough.  That’s part of what the Old Testament kept saying.  “Do what you’re told, and you’ll be saved.”  But Jesus said, “No, it’s more than that.  It’s not so much about what you do, because I’ll tell you something about sin.  I’m going to do something for you that wipes away every sin.”  That’s what Paul is talking about in the second reading.  “I’ve got to preach the mystery of the cross.”  And the cross is God, through this event in history, when he as a man, as a God was treated the way he was, and he did nothing but forgive.  He’s trying to say, “This God of yours is not so much interested in how well you follow the rules and laws as much as he’s interested in you allowing him to do something extraordinary and mysterious.  He wants to come and live inside of you.”  So if there’s anything that the cross teaches, that Jesus is teaching, is that we are made, as Christ was on this earth, to have God dwelling in us.  He becomes our mentor, our teacher, our guide, and he’s not there simply to keep us from sinning, because sinning somehow includes the mistakes we need to make in order to grow.  No, he’s there to do something else, something really wonderful that we don’t often hear about — this work of God from the church:  “I come to enter into you so that you will trust me, and I will be like a Spirit in you. My presence is in you. I’m God, the Holy Spirit, and now I’m going to be in you, guiding you, teaching you and showing you something. And what it is I’m showing you is not how to be perfect.”  But the real work of this God of ours is to come into us and to somehow enable you and me to discover who we are. He’s mostly interested in having a relationship with us, one-on-one, in which he heals us of all the heavy weight of trying to be what we’re told to be. It’s like having a taskmaster and an incredibly heavy yoke around us and somebody beating us and pulling this enormous weight uphill.  We’re always grieving, grieving that we’re not who we should be, grieving that we’ve failed, grieving that we have this hidden thing inside us — we won’t tell anybody — that makes us feel so much shame.  That heavy burden of grief is what Jesus came to free us from, and he’s going to do it by improving our sense of our self.  

We’ve always been told in Christianity that it’s how we treat others. That’s the most important thing.  What we’re not always told is that the way we treat others is always going to be an exact replica of the way we treat ourselves.  The way Scripture often says that is, “If you say you love God, but you hate your neighbor, you’re a liar.”  If you say, “I hate myself, and that’s what God wants, because I’m supposed to not think of myself as good.  I’m supposed to think of myself as bad, but I forgive, and I love my neighbors, but I’m hard on myself,” that’s another lie.  If you see yourself as a failure, just deep down, below the surface, unconsciously you carry this burden inside you, you’re going to be two things.  You’re going to live in darkness, and what is said in that first reading is so beautiful.  It’s saying, “Do you understand that this wonderful thing that God is doing for you, when you experience it, it’s like harvest time. Everybody gets the bounty of their work. All of a sudden, you’ve done a battle, and you’re dividing all the spoils, all the things you took from others, and it’s like Christmas.” That’s what the prophet Isaiah is saying in that first reading.  Something is coming.  It’s going to lift you out of this place of burdensome shame and guilt, and it’s going to be wonderful.  And so you see salvation history as the story of this plan unfolding, and now you and I live in this wonderful time called the time of the Spirit, the fullness of revelation.  

So we have a history that we should be paying attention to, particularly that early history when we were asked to try to do the impossible, and the more we tried to do it, the darker things got, until it was clear that we needed a Messiah.  And what he did was take away the obligation of having to do what is right because of the threat, the fear of punishment, the threat or the fear of disappointing our God.  So you look at that and say, “Well, if that’s the fundamental energy that goes into Christianity, then Christianity can never become what it’s intended to be.” It’s not about feeling this heavy burden. So what Jesus is saying — and he knows this, he’s seen the light, he knows what he’s about — is, “If I preach this message, if I can tell people what this God really wants to do inside them, this personal, intimate relationship in which he keeps affirming us and building us up till we begin to love and revere who we are in the midst of all our mistakes and all our stupid ideas. He still works with that and keeps purifying it and bringing more light into it and more light until you begin to see things more clearly.”  

And so Jesus uses a word that’s so important to understand.  John the Baptist is in prison.  He now knows that it’s his time to preach and teach, and he starts, and he says, “There’s something at hand.  A kingdom is coming.  Something is about to happen.”  The kingdom is peace. What is being given is grace. Grace is unconditional forgiveness. Nothing we do irritates God in terms of his desire or his longing to do something for you. When sins damage you and other people, there’s a sadness in God, but there’s never any kind of holding back the care and the love he has, the desire that he wants you to change.   In fact, I guarantee you, the further away from the truth, the further away from the light, the deeper you are in darkness, the more that light is pursuing you.  And here’s the experience of light.  You repent.  It means change, yes, but it’s a strange, strange word, I think. At least I didn’t really understand the fullness of it until I started looking at the word and studying it more fully, and what I realized is repentance has something to do with seeing something you’re doing or have done, and when you see it for what it is, it’s not what you thought it was.  It’s not something that benefits you or anybody else, and you feel — you feel bad.  You regret that it’s part of you.  

Now, what science has taught us about human nature is that we grow in the world.  We come into the world.  We grow because of the things that are going on around us.  We take those things into us.  We’re a mimetic people.  We imitate the adults, the people around us, as we grow, and then we set up patterns in our brains that take care of things so that we don’t have to think through every situation to see how we’re going to respond.  We’re sort of programmed, and 90 percent of our reactions to things are not reflecting on something and deciding, “That irritates me,” or, “I think that’s stupid,” or, “I hate that.”  No, it’s because you’ve always been trained that way, and you don’t have to think.  You just  have an  instant reaction.  

How do you change a pattern like that?  You’re not even aware it’s there. You’re not even aware why you’re doing it. You’re just doing it because you always have done it.  So if that’s the reality, then this statement, “Repent,” is like asking you to slow down and be more reflective and start looking carefully at why you respond to things the way you do. Does it really feel good to be better than the people around you?  I was trained that way.  I still fall into that trap, but what does it really mean to feel better than someone else?  Are you really better than somebody else?  When you put somebody down and expose them as less than you and you feel better, is that really making sense to you?  But if you see that’s been a pattern in your life and then you go and look at it — and Jesus is saying, “Now repent.”  So you look at it, and you say, “That isn’t what I want to be.  That isn’t who I am.”  And yet you’ve done it forever, and then you’ve got to grieve it, and the grieving is the part of heaviness, because grief is holding something heavy and difficult in your consciousness for a while, like a loss of someone. You don’t forget about it.  It’s all-consuming. You just stay with the pain of it, and then you work through it.  So that’s what God is saying.  “I want you to do this.” This is Jesus’ message. “I want you to go through this process of repentance.”  And when you see the things that are really happening and you decide that you’re going to change because they don’t work, the change is automatic.  It’s a new pattern, and you begin to feel free.  You begin to be more life-giving, and the biggest thing that is gone is the burden and the thought that you have a taskmaster forcing you to act in a way that you don’t think you should, but actually that’s what you really want. 

Father, your gift of light is our greatest treasure.  Open our eyes.  Help us in the midst of our darkness to look for this light and to find it and to know the joy and the peace that it brings and to experience the joy of sharing that light with our brothers and sisters, and we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.