Do we have access to God?
Humankind has long known that God is ineffable, that is, that God is too great to be expressed or described in words. Paul recognizes this in his Letter to the Romans: How inscrutable are God’s judgments and how unsearchable his ways! We can’t know the mind of the Lord; we can’t plumb the depths of God’s wisdom. And so, like Paul, we must simply trust, confident in our God who has invested all in Creation – for from him and through him and for him are all things – with faith in God’s plan for us all.
And yet… ultimately, Jesus himself is our access to God. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Like the key placed on Eliakim’s shoulder in Isaiah’s story of Shebna, a key that gives access to the king, Jesus opens our way to God through his death and resurrection. Our role is to collaborate with him, remaining open to the Lord and to the Lord’s revelation as Peter was, even as we are fully aware of the inscrutability of the Lord. The Christian community was founded on faith, on the disciples’ ability to hear God and to be open to God. Indeed, faith is the key that opens us to God’s will rather than subjecting us to our own will. Knowing, as Psalm 138 suggests, that the Lord hears the words of our mouth, we must be open to the intimacy that the Lord reveals, a community or ekklesia gathered together around our belief in Jesus, willing to embrace his inscrutability as we nonetheless seek a covenant relationship with our Lord, our God of kindness and truth.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
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