Are there limitations on who receives God’s love?
In this Sunday's readings, the prophet Isaiah is tasked with bringing surprising news to the
people of Israel, a cohort that has long believed itself to be the chosen people. I love you, God says to them, and I expect
you to stay in relationship with me through your attention to my Word: Observe
what is right, do what is just. In
this way, God intends for Israel to draw the entire world to God, as Psalm 67
reminds them: May God let his face shine upon us, so that his way may be known among
all nations. For – and here's the shocker – God’s covenant is
by no means exclusive: all who hold to my covenant, them will I
bring to my holy mountain, Isaiah tells them. Jews and foreigners alike must thus respond to the
invitation to covenant with justice and hearts open to the love of God.
Jesus demonstrates this same principle in his encounter with
the Canaanite woman in Matthew's Gospel. This woman, who
dares to approach Jesus and beg for healing for her suffering daughter, is at
first apparently rebuffed by Jesus: when
she asks for help, he responds with an apparent insult, It is not
right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs. But her persistent faith in his power to heal
– his divine power – and Jesus’s
reaction, O woman, great is your faith! show that God’s love is not reserved for some ill-defined elect; rather, it is open
to all who, like her, have open hearts, to all those who hope, to all those who
believe… Which is precisely what the Jews have failed to do, Paul notes, in his
Letter to the Romans. The disobedience of the Paul’s race, the Jews, lies in their rejection
of the Good News, in their failure to embrace Jesus as the long-awaited
Messiah. Yet ultimately, God will have mercy upon all, Paul assures the
Romans, so long as they are one day open to Jesus’s love in their hearts.
For the gift and the
call of God are irrevocable. God’s love is the
source and culmination of all gifts, the source of our call. And all – God’s grace, God’s graciousness,
God’s love for creation – all this makes salvation possible, for God’s love
never changes. To the contrary, it calls
us unceasingly to life. And once a heart is opened in love, there is no taking it back. So respond to the call, and open your hearts wide to receive God’s infinite, flowing love!
This post is based on Fr. Pat's Scripture class.
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