WHAT WE EXPECT TO SEE may profoundly affect what we actually perceive. We have a God who constantly calls us to pay attention, to observe closely. In the Gospel accounts he often asks, “What are you seeing?” He takes us by the elbow, urging us to “Look! Listen!” as he describes the impact of his messenger, John the Baptizer. Jesus affirms that John is a prophet of strong convictions, a risk-taker not shaken by winds of opinion or circumstance. He’s one of the common people, able to live austerely. “He’s the one I want you to notice, to listen to,” Jesus says. Then, while extolling John’s powerful prophetic message, Jesus upends all the old scales of human value. “The least in the kingdom of God is greater than he,” he tells the people of his day, and us. In effect he’s letting us know that in God’s kingdom the valued ones—as he had enumerated earlier in the Beatitudes—are the poor, the hungry, the grieving, the hated and excluded, for their reward “is great in heaven.” To us, in our consumer culture, this feels like a huge risk.
Jesus bore out this new, counter-intuitive principle in his own human life. By arriving on this planet in the meanest of circumstances himself he was telling us, “It’s the calling of God—and obedience to that call— that matters, not popularity or smooth talk or convenience or great wealth.” You can’t be very convincing about the need for the good life and its perks if you speak from a stable’s muddy floor!
Yet for those who follow him, risking everything, the opportunities are magnificent. Centuries earlier Isaiah had looked forward to a time when the disadvantaged (once again, the poor, the barren, the widowed, the diseased) would be encouraged. He spoke to the humble tent-dwellers of his day (and aren’t we all temporary inhabitants on this planet?): “Enlarge your tent sites . . . stretch out . . . don’t hold back . . . lengthen the tent cords . . . strengthen your stakes . . . spread out to the right and to the left.” There’s a whole world to be claimed for God! There again, our common perceptions of worth are reversed. The stigma of childlessness and widowhood would be erased.
Too many of us live cautiously, apprehensive about the future, hedging ourselves around with various security systems and insurance programs, paying too little attention to divine assurances of protection. Yet faith always implies risk. We need to remember that we are the creatures of a God who was himself, from our human viewpoint, invested in risky enterprises. Think of the risk of giving human beings free will—the choice for or against God!
Those who witnessed the life of John, the desert-dwelling prophet in his camel-skins, who watched as Jesus, from his birth, was riskily and radically invested in “his Father’s business,” were given the chance to either accept or refuse the opportunity to become followers of the Son of God. Both risk and faith are expansive and far from passive. They don’t say “Maybe,” or “Some other time, perhaps.” In spite of obstacles they rarely hold back. Lukewarm responses, passivity, will earn us no points on heaven’s report card.
Wholeheartedness. That’s the quality that should characterize us and that will warm the heart of God.
~From Lucy Shaw, “Third Thursday in Advent,” in GOD WITH US: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas, edited by Greg Pennoyer & Gregory Wolfe
