How open are you
to receiving the Lord?
In the Book of Isaiah, King Ahaz is
reluctant to follow God’s order: Ask for a sign from the Lord, your God; let
it be as deep as the netherworld, or as high as the sky. When Ahaz balks, saying, I will not tempt the Lord!, God promises a sign anyway: the
virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel. Like Ahaz, we need to get our faith in order;
we need to trust that God will be present to us, and we must be open to receiving
the Lord. Psalm 24 confirms the need for
the openness to receive the Lord: only one whose hands are sinless, whose heart is
not vain can ascend the mountain of
the Lord, the psalmist tells us – He
shall receive a blessing from the Lord, but only if he remains open and
continues to seek the face of the God of
Jacob.
Unlike Ahaz,
Joseph is not afraid to trust the angel
of the Lord that appears to him in a dream, echoing the prophecy of Isaiah to Ahaz and confirming that it will be fulfilled in his wife Mary. In Matthew's Gospel, Joseph does have a choice, but he doesn’t
question God: he is open to receiving
the Lord into his home, that the child might be, as Paul tells the Romans, descended from David according to the flesh. It is through this child’s eventual death and
rising that, Paul says, we have received
the grace of apostleship, the gift of being sent to proclaim the good news,
of being set apart for the gospel of God. Only through our belief in Christ Jesus,
God-with-us, Emmanuel, only through the obedience
of our faith, through our
openness to receiving the Lord into our lives, by seeking the face of God daily, can we know the salvation that has
been promised, the reward from God
our savior.
This post is based
on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordcloud.com
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