29 January 2019
Tuesday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time
Jesus Christ is the Word of the Father, the eternally begotten Son who has come into the world. Quoting the Septuagint Psalms, Hebrews 10 plunges us into the heart of the mystery by putting to words the fundamental attitude of the Word made Man: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a bodyyou prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you took no delight. Then I said, as is written of me in the scroll, ‘behold, I come to do your will, O God.’”
(1) The author of the letter to the Hebrews insists that the old pattern of sacrifices and offerings to make up for where one falls short in one’s relationship with God cannot be a final answer that expresses the heart of the relationship. Today, people can be tempted to make a fetish of conversion/mercy stories. The moment in which one acknowledges one’s sin and need for grace and receives God’s mercy is truly beautiful. But, while God never tires of forgiving us, his deepest desire is not for us to keep doing wrong so that we might ever again be healed. No. God does not lift us up hoping that we will again fall so that we might be lifted up again. He lifts us up and tells us to pick up our stretcher and walk. To obsess over the broken-healing cycle excessively can be to fall back into a new form of the old trap of burnt offerings and sin offerings.
(2) At the incarnation, the eternal Son delights to take on the fullness of being a real man! He revels in the “body you prepared for me,” with all of its spatio-temporal limitations. We often think that to be like God is to have none of these limitations, but Jesus reveals the opposite. The Son is not merely like God, the Son is God: he never ceases to be true God even as he becomes the true Man, the Man who reveals to us all that there is no opposition between our human nature and the divine life that God offers us in Christ. We can live the life of God, because in Jesus Christ, that truly divine life is given to us as a truly human life. We share in that life not by escaping from the limits of our body through meditation techniques or cyberspace or unnecessary medical interventions that try “overcome” the “limitations” of our human body. Rather, we share in the divine life by embracing the givenness of our fleshy, bodily existence with the same delight as Jesus Christ: “a body you have prepared for me: behold! I come to do your will, O God!” In the body God prepares for us (which includes the Church, Christ’s own body), everything is given to us so that we might live the fullness of the divine life that Christ offers us. “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mk 3:35).