Saturday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time
My undergraduate degree was a double major between History and English, so it should come as no surprise that amid all the richness of today’s readings, I was drawn to four lines of a poem. In the middle of our selection from Psalm 85 we find these lines. “Kindness and truth shall meet;/ justice and peace shall kiss./ Truth shall spring out of the earth,/ and justice shall look down from heaven.” As we seek to live heaven on earth, I find myself echoing the longings of the Psalmist in these four lines as he envisions life when God’s reign is fulfilled.
“Kindness and truth shall meet…” Hopefully these two are not strangers. However, have you ever strained a relationship by sharing a truth that the other person wasn’t ready to hear? Have you ever enabled a friend in their habits, sins, or dispositions, because you couldn’t think of a loving way of speaking against those things? To speak truth in love and never hide the truth in the name of love is not only a struggle today, but was one thousands of years ago.
“…Justice and peace shall kiss…” A kiss is intimate, gentle, and vulnerable and yet this rarely seems to be the relationship between justice and peace that we, as humans, contrive it. Often our pursuit of justice disrupts ‘peace’. I’ve set ‘peace’ aside in single quotes though, because often our versions of peace are dependent on another facing injustice. How many times have people oppressed, killed, or removed a group of people to create a ‘peace.’ In these ways, justice is deprived from another in the name of peace.
“…Truth shall spring out of the earth and justice shall look down from heaven.” This longing is so relevant as we continue to reel at our human capacity to hide evil, specifically in the betrayals that continue to come to light in the church. When God’s reign is full truth springs out of the earth. It is called forth by the light and flourishes in the light. Instead we bury the truth, avoid it, or try to silence, but we wish it could flourish and spring forth.
The longings of my heart today, were expressed so well thousands of years ago. Will things ever change? Has anything changed? I believe the answer is yes. We’ve seen the one in whom kindness and truth met, in whom justice and peace kiss. We’ve seen the one who bore witness to God’s true love so strongly that he hung from a cross planted in the ground and sprang forth from an empty tomb hewn in the ground. We have Jesus and we hear him beckon us to imitate him as he says, “you have but one master, the Christ.”
When we allow him to be the master of our lives, these longings can come closer to reality.
- Spencer Hargadon