Sunday in Octave of Christmas 30.12.12 Waiting
The Jews waited a long time for the Messiah. Even when He came He took another thirty years before beginning His public life. Even then He was in no apparent hurry to make Himself known.
Now we have been waiting 2000 years for Him to come again.
He does come to us in the sacraments but there His presence is veiled, partially hidden.
So between hiding Himself and making us wait what is He trying to tell us in all this?
The underlying point is that the workings of God require a human response to be complete.
If He hides Himself from us; if it seems to us that He takes too long to move to the next stage - He is forcing us to seek Him. The seeking heart values more fully that which it seeks.
That is one part of the answer. Another part would be that we have clouded the issue by our sinfulness, our wilfulness, our refusal to accept with childlike trust those things He has offered us.
We have impeded His revelation. The Jews spent 40 extra years in the desert for their disobedience; and later generations have not been any wiser.
God has been rejected in every form in which He has come or shown Himself. Rejected from the Crib to the Cross, and beyond.
When He does not find faith He is less likely to work miracles. And he wrought not many miracles there, because of their unbelief. (Mt 13,58)
So He is hidden, partly to make us look for Him; partly because we have obscured His presence. We have made it harder than it needed to be.
If we seek Him we shall find. Having found Him we must stay with Him, building up our faith.
We are not sure of the timing of His interventions (such as the Second Coming) but it is always better if we are humble, expectant, waiting... like Simeon and Anna.
They were patient; and they persevered for years. Just waiting for the Messiah. If more people were like them we would have a very different world.
We are active in the waiting process. There are things we do not know; things we cannot know; things we do not need to know – but if we stay at our post God can use us.
It is as if He would say, Is there anyone around here who believes in Me? When He finds one of exceptional faith He can use that person as a launching point for further revelation. Thus Simeon and Anna, or more generally Mary and Joseph.
Can we be such people? Yes, and we should be.
Think of Simeon and Anna standing around in the temple for decades. Just praying for the Messiah to come. We could imagine someone saying, in today’s equivalent: Go and get a life! Go and do something more useful etc...
For our part we are not sure sometimes if our prayer is doing anything or not. Some things are very slow to happen, such as when we pray for a change of heart, or change of mentality in a society.
We just hammer away, making ourselves receptive to the grace of God.
In any event it is always best to be faithful. What if Simeon and Anna had died without seeing the Christ? They would still have gone to heaven, and seen Him from there. There are many generations who have died without seeing the next major intervention from God. But we all make part of the chain of faith that covers the whole of salvation history.
And the trust we show in Him is more important than whether we see the outcome.
So we stand at our post, and wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment