EDante, 4 June 2017 Pentecost Sunday, AIT home
God first wants intimacy Let me begin this reflection with a story. A long time ago, there was a young prince who was looking for a lovely girl to marry. One day, as he drove from his palace to a nearby city, he had to pass through a rather poor area. He happened to see out of the window a beautiful young girl. He was attracted to her immediately. So he made several trips to the poor area over the next couple of days in order to see the girl from his car. Soon he began to feel that he was in love. But now he had a problem. How should he proceed to introduce himself? He thought he could order her to the palace and then propose marriage. But no, he felt he would not want to overwhelm the girl by his authority and power. He thought he could arrive at her door in his royal robe and with a bow ask her hand. No, it won’t work he thought. He wanted the girl to accept him for love. He thought he could pretend to be an ordinary boy and try to gain her interest. After he proposed, he could reveal his real self. But still, he felt that it would still be too dramatic. Finally, he said he would give up his princely role and move into her neighborhood. There he would take up work as a carpenter. During his work in the day and during his time off in the evening, he would get acquainted with the people, begin to share their interests and concerns, begin to talk their language. And in due time, should fortune be with him, he would make her acquaintance in a natural way. And should she come to love him, as he had already come to love her, then he would ask for her hand. Like any other fairy tale the story ended when the two got married and lived together forever. This is what God is trying to do with us. We know God as the great creator of the universe and humanity, as having great power and majesty and as one who reigns in heaven and earth. But few people realized that God is a great and persistent lover. Just like the above story, He is in love with us. Poor and wretched as we are, He emptied himself, taking the nature of a slave, and appearing in the form of man He humbled himself (Phil 2:6-8) to meet us on our own poverty that we might respond freely to His love. This wonderful truth is celebrated in the famous Christian song: “Jesus, lover of my soul, Jesus, I will never let You go, You've taken me from the miry clay, You've set my feet upon the rock. And now I know, I love you, I need you, though my world may fall, I'll never let You go, My Saviour, My closest Friend.” God is a lover and a friend. God loves us and He wants our love. But it had to be free and voluntary love. He could have ordered us to love Him but that would not be voluntary. He could have appeared to us in his princely glory, but he does not want to force us to obey. He wanted to win our love without overwhelming us by the magnificence of His divinity. Being a great Lover, the Lord always speaks of love to His beloved. His loving words and deeds are recorded in the bible. In fact, the entire bible can be summed up with just one word, i.e. Love. He also speaks love through prophets and mystics. My favourite loving words from God were spoken through St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople (349-407): “I your father, I your spouse, I your home, I your nurse, I your root, I your foundation. Whatever you want, I will be. You will lack nothing. I will labor for you. For I came to serve and not to be served. I will be your friend and your host, your head and your brother, your sister and your mother. I will be everything. Only be intimate with Me! I will be poor for you, errant for you, on the Cross for you, in the Tomb for you. Above I plead the Father for your sake, on earth I became intercessor to the Father for your sake. You are everything for Me, brother, co-heir, friend and member. What more do you want?” Even today, God continues to speak of His love. From the book True Life in God, the heavenly Father sings His love hymn for us: “I desired us to be united forever; you needing Me, loving Me and bound forever to Me and I bound to you; I who created you…and I who was first to lay eyes on you; I who filled you with My Spirit willed it; I will care for you; I will soothe you if in pain; I will cover you with My blessings; I will provide what you lack; I am Infinite Wealth; you need not fear with Me, I am He who holds the earth's foundations; leave Me free to do with you whatsoever I want; I am so happy having you near Me, you so frail and weak, for I know that your heart will let Me do as I please with you; fear not, for I am your Heavenly Father, and I love you beyond any human understanding; I am Yahweh and if you have not heard afore, I am telling you now, that I am known to be Faithful and My word stands secure; you must learn how I feel, how I work and how My love enkindles hearts; how else would you be able to tell My beloved children? I want you to be intimate with Me.” God first wants intimacy. He wants to be near and close with us much more than we have ever desire it. Our soul experienced the desire for God at its first encounter with Him at its creation. This encounter made a deep impression upon our spirit and caused an inner and lifelong desire for God. Therefore, it is a human need to seek and believe in God, much more than the need to eat and drink. However, man does not recognize this need so he ends up looking at something else with the hope of satisfying the need of his soul. Man experiences this feeling of restlessness and often asking himself what exactly it is I am looking for in life. St Augustine expresses this restlessness beautifully in his famous words: “My heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee. My heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee”. Today the Holy Spirit is speaking to us everywhere, inviting all us to respond to God’s love and call for intimacy. Intimacy is the key to the knowledge of God. It is the time of grace. God’s call is manifested powerfully in our time through the spiritual renewal movement within the church. It places an emphasis on intimacy with God and expressing the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Through this spiritual movement, communities and prayer groups have been formed. Members have experienced a new life within them and committed to practice a Christ-centred life. We have the proof that God still loves us and that He has sent His Holy Spirit powerfully in our time to say to us: “Come.” We must respond We must submit ourselves to Him. We have to open the door of our heart to grace and without any hesitation, fall in our Father’s Arms. We must allow God to reveal himself fully in us through an intimate and loving relationship. But how, you may wonder? It is not possible because we are sinners, you may object? The key is this: “go and sin no more” (John 8:11). Past is past, we can’t change it. But we can decide what we want to do in future. To sin no more requires a total change. In the church terminology, it is called repentance which comes from the Greek word Metanoia. It means a transformative change of heart and suggests change of mind and reformation of lives. The first critical step in repentance is the recognition of sin. Oftentimes we do not see our sins. Thus, we walk about life as if we are fine but actually we are on the path to hell. Let us learn a lesson from the life of Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus. Apart from his betrayal, the New Testament offers very little information about Judas. However, a tiny reference of him is found in John 12:6: “He said this (referring to Judas), not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it.” The betrayal and eventual suicide was Judas’ greatest sin, but even before it happened he had sinned while in close proximity with Jesus for three years, witnessing many miracles to prove Jesus’ divine origin and listening to His powerful words that penetrate the hearts of many people in his time. While these were happening, Judas, in the middle of the night, when he thought he was all alone, stole money from the donations intended for the poor. But he was never alone. His fellow apostle, John, understood that Jesus knows everything (1 John 3:20). God knows what lies in the darkness (Daniel 2:22). Nothing can escape from God’s eyes. Judas’ story teaches us to guard against small, gradual failing that gain strength and power in our lives and that could open the door to more deadly sins. His story is also a great reminder that appearances can be deceiving. Remember what Jesus said: "Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name drive out demons and perform many miracles? ’Then I will tell them plainly, I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness"(Mt 7: 22-23). We need God to reveal to us the condition of our heart our sins whether through the scriptures, homilies, prophets and our own consciences through divine inspiration. It is the Holy Spirit who convicts us of our sin in the sense He convinces us of our sin. Once we recognize our sin through grace, we must cooperate with the Holy Spirit to repent by confessing our sins through the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Confession is essential because our sin affects the entire church. Sin is not a private matter. If one member suffers, all suffer together (1 Corinthians 12:26). Jesus has given the apostles and passed on through those ordained priests to absolve or forgive our sin through the Sacrament of Reconciliation by his command: "Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retain" (John 20:23). This rite removes the space of sin in our soul and fills it with grace, the Holy Spirit Himself. It also anoints those weak areas of our soul with new strength to resist temptation. It makes a person no longer a sinner. Our intimate union with the Holy Spirit is deepened every time we see our sin, repent and confess. To refuse to repent is to refuse the Holy Spirit’s entrance. Finally, the resolution not to sin again is necessary. It is an ongoing lifelong process to avoid sin at all costs. This is exactly where Jesus is leading us: to avoid sin and to live in an unceasing life of prayer. It is a precondition to an intimate and loving relationship with God. What are sins? Capital sins are pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, greed and idleness. There are sins against the commandments. Sins do not just happen and are not accident, they are willed. It is important to have nothing to do with them. Let us imitate St. Catherine of Genoa who after experiencing the horror of sins exclaimed: “No more world for me! No more sin!” To resolve not to sin again is a grace to be prayed for daily. Therefore, as we celebrate Pentecost Sunday today, let us pray: “Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth”. Comments are closed.
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