Today’s Readings:
{The Spirit} will guide you to all truth. John 16:13
What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you. Acts 16:23
I love that these two readings are a set, coming as we ramp up to Pentecost. The entire mystery of Passover is about to be revealed to the entire world: What was for the Jews the “Liberation from Egypt” was only a sign, a type of liberation for all the world. What happened in Holy Week broke that open like a sealed scroll and handed it on to all the world, no longer revealed only to initiates, but common to all. What was, at Pentecost, the giving of the Law to those same initiates, prepared now to evangelize the world, becomes the Keys of Heaven for whole world. God’s farmers, God’s shepherds, God’s workmen sent out into the Vineyard to gather all in. And what do they find – Peter, Paul, John, and the other Apostles – when they get out into the world?
They find that God has been sowing seeds in all cultures, in all places: not only Israel, but all places are prepared for the Gospel! Athens, Rome, India, all are ready to be freed in the Liberation from Demons by the world’s Passover; brought out of Egypt, with the law inscribed on their hearts, to the Glory of a land flowing with milk and honey.
Pope St Gregory the Great realized this, as did so many others: the Jesuits in China, the Franciscans in the Americas, the Virgin Mary at Tepeyac… we stand not in a world empty of God, but in a world made by God, through His Logos. Jesus is the very warp and weft of the universe. We will never go anywhere he has not been first.
Not even grief, or joy:
Imagine the man you call “Daddy” died and you get to see him, finally, in heaven… and Jesus has done that. Our Lord has done even that: lost a parent, and been reunited with him. And I can’t but imagine how much more heaven must have been filled with Joy at that meeting. When Jesus says, “Daddy.”
Anything that is, is for us now: for our salvation, for our uncovering, for the Passover of God has redeemed it all.
Still we push it back into darkness sometimes.
And in fear we hide from it, we slay children in the womb and on the street, we bomb music venues, we bomb villages. Islam has done nowhere half as much damage to the world as Wal*Mart, and for every girl kidnapped and freed by Boko Haram, there are 11,575 children enslaved in China making our t-shirts and electronics.
We struggle to hide in a darkness of our own making from the very light God uses to make everything.
And yet God cries out: what you worship unknowingly, I proclaim to you. Hear me and I will guide you into all Truth: the only truth that is or can ever be. Jesus.
Doxos 