Monday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time
One of my favorite moments at family gatherings is when the reminiscing about family history begins. All sorts of stories are shared. Some are goofy, others heroic, some about God's providential hand, and some about the darker and harder things the family has faced. All of them help give the family identity. Their is a legacy and legend to be upheld or in some cases overcome. This is the theme I found connecting the first reading and the Gospel today.
The first reading is reminding us of our family history. We are being reminded who we are, where we came from, what God has done for us, what others have done to us, and how we are to be in this world because of it all. There is identity, call, and belonging in the first reading. It shows that who we understand ourselves to be and what we think our role is, is intimately wrapped up in our understanding of what God has done and who God is.
But there are other voices in our life. Voices that want to tell us we can't belong or that God doesn't do enough for us. These voices, whether they are external or internal, intentional or unintentional, can undermine the familial belonging that we have in faith. To me, the Gospel overcomes this.
Today's Gospel has two telling scenes in it. The first and most stark responds to the last challenge. The challenge of "God hasn't done enough."
Jesus is preparing his disciples for what is to come and tells them that he will be handed over and killed. God incarnate will suffer from betrayal, humiliation, persecution, injustice, corruption, torture, complicit silence, and eventual execution. God has done this for us, along with so much more. We might feel that God hasn't done enough, but when we take all that God did as recounted in our first reading, and all that Jesus did for us, we are challenged. We aren't challenged to ignore the feeling that we need more of God's active presence in our life. That is a good desire. But we are challenged to learn how to better lean on that which has already been done to find proof of God's radical love for us.
All that God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) has done for us makes this a familial affair worth belonging to, but the voice that says we don't belong still lingers. Here I turn to the second half of the Gospel today. Now this is just my own reading for a reflection, and is not reliant on any scholars, but I find Jesus telling us we belong in this scene.
The temple is THE house of worship for a first century Jewish person. Synagogue is great and all, but Temple is the true legacy. To continue our familial language from before, the local synagogue might be the breakfast table and the Temple is the Thanksgiving table. Both are family but to a different degree. To belong to the Temple is to belong to God in a special way. And what does Jesus say to Peter? In my won paraphrase he says, we are already subjects in the kingdom, but to not offend, we'll pay the tax. Through closeness to Jesus we gain access to the legacy and demands that we read in the first reading. We belong. I belong. You belong, because the true Son of the Living God shared with his disciples his own belonging.
We belong to God because God has given himself to us in order to draw us back into the fullness of himself.
We belong to one another because we belong to God who bought our belonging with his life.
God wants us to belong.
You belong, I belong, we belong, to a God who has done so much for us.
- Spencer Hargadon