31 January 2021
Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
God led his chosen people out of slavery in Egypt and into the promised land only after many years of wandering in the wilderness. It was in the wilderness that God tested his people and formed them. It was there that he warned them not to have any “charmer” among them (Deut. 18:11: incantator, ἐπαείδων). In other words, we should not hang out with someone who is trying to charm us, to cast a spell on us, as it were. Naturally, we prefer the company of charming people, but we must not overestimate our ability to resist their charms. We must be mindful of the possibility that, at some unconscious level, we like being charmed.
To be holy is simply not the same thing as to be charming. We have to learn and re-learn how to separate out the two. God wants us to cooperate with his grace and so become the best possible version of ourselves. Our cooperation with God must be sober and based in reality, not lost in delight. Moses, for example, was a holy man, but you wouldn’t call him charming or delightful. Quite the contrary: he was astonishingly blunt. In fact, he had a speech impediment of some kind. He was holy because he listened to God and cooperated with him. The Israelites became holy in the wilderness: the very opposite of a charming place. Let us, too, become holy, avoiding, when necessary, the people and things that charm us.