What walls do we erect between
ourselves and other?
Between ourselves and God?
When Jesus heals ten lepers in
Luke’s Gospel, he is transcending boundaries of all kinds, not only the
limitations of disease but also the humanly-generated division of religion
affiliation: the only man who returns to give thanks to God is a Samaritan,
whereas Jesus is a Jew. For Christ knows
no boundaries, and the Samaritan man must sense that in Jesus, he has found an
instrument or manifestation of the one God who, as Psalm 98 proclaims, has revealed his saving power. In the
psalm, God does this in the sight of the
nations – plural: salvation entails an end to division, to
boundaries, to humanly imposed limitations.
Likewise, in 2 Kings, the cleansed leper Naaman of the pagan territory
Aram ends up recognizing that there is no
God in all the earth except the God of Israel who has saved him. Naaman thus embraces a singular, undivided
belief in Elisha’s God, and will no
longer offer holocaust or sacrifice to any other god except to the Lord. Barriers fall as God reveals his saving power, not only to the people of Israel, but to all.
In Ephesus, Timothy encounters
prejudice; Paul writes to Timothy to encourage him to ignore the limitations
imposed by the people, because such limitations are no barrier to God, only to
human beings, if we let them become so.
For the word of God cannot be chained, Paul tells Timothy: God transcends all boundaries; God’s love reaches
beyond them, and even beyond our own ability
to deny him. An end to
division: this is what we are to strive
for, what we must work towards, with love as our calling card, love issuing
from the very depths of our being, love that serves as a mechanism to destroy
any walls we may erect between ourselves and the world, and certainly between
ourselves and God. For Christ knows no
division, no distance… only love.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s
Scripture class.
Image source: Wordle
No comments:
Post a Comment