Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Today's Scripture

Maybe it’s because of the economic situation now, or the wars, or the fact that I have a two year old and that means I worry more, but lately I’ve often felt like the world is a pretty scary place.  And so I’ve been remembering hymns that have to do with God and fear.  One we often sang in my grandmother’s Methodist Church went like this: “Fear not, I am with thee, O be not afraid, for I am thy God and will still give thee aid.”  Another is a song I learned when I became Catholic: “Be not afraid – I go before you always.  Come follow me, and I will give you rest.”  

 

It’s always nice, too, when the scriptures of the day speak to these fears, as they do today.  The first reading is from one of the minor prophets, Haggai (2:9), who writes in an age of fear and  uncertainty for the Hebrew people.  In 586 BC, the Babylonian empire had conquered the city of Jerusalem and sent notable leaders (including Haggai’s own family) in exile to the capital of Babylon.  Their captivity ended just shy of fifty years later, when the Persian empire conquered the Babylonians, at which point, the Persians began sending the Hebrews home.  Haggai was among some of the first group to return, and because it has only been fifty years or so, he is among people who remember what it was like back in the day when they had their own king and weren’t subject to other empires.

 

So Haggai offers a beam of hope – that things will change.  Sometimes I think people are fearful of change, but in troubled times, people begin to hope that there will be a change.  So, God promises to shake things up (literally), and to restore the glory of the Hebrews beyond what it had been before the Babylonian captivity. 

For Christians, that restored glory takes the form of Jesus Christ, an heir to the throne of King David.  Today’s gospel reading (Luke 9:18-22) alludes to Jesus’ royal heritage when Peter mentions that Jesus is the Christ.  “Christ” means “anointed one” and the ones who were anointed in the Old Testament were kings, prophets and priests.  So Peter is alluding to that relationship a bit – but Jesus is an odd heir because he is a poor carpenter’s son, born in a tiny part of the Roman Empire, who does not take over the kingship in the way that Haggai’s people hoped. 

God is with us, for a change.  No longer will God operate in conjunction with kings and prophets as in the Old Testament – but here is a radically new vision.  Here is the anointed one who will not return to Jerusalem in glory, but will be crucified but rise from the dead.  These are very deep, even shocking changes and it is no wonder that Jesus admonishes his disciples to keep quiet.

Yet it is the very fact that God upholds promises, even if they change the way we think and view the world, that reminds us – God is with us in this crazy world.  Perhaps it is even the case that because God came to us as a human and experienced what we do, that we can truly say, in the midst of the good and the not-so-great times, God is with us.

-          Jana M. Bennett