Memorial of Saint Anthony, Abbott

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/011712.cfm

What is over the horizon?

Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.

Living in a time of tremendous change, we are confronted rather often with the unexpected and the unforeseen. In retrospect we might suppose we should have seen it coming – the burst of the housing bubble, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme, or the nine-eleven attack on the United States, for instance; and some people will declare they did see it coming and they did sound the alarm but no one was listening. But the future, especially in our time, is largely unforeseeable.

Short of predicting the sun will rise tomorrow morning, it’s hard to know what might happen. But even movements of the sun, if the Portuguese at Fatima are to be believed, isn’t always predictable.  

Today’s Bible readings remind us of that unpredictability in troubled times. When Samuel went to Bethlehem to anoint another king no one suspected what he was up to. For that matter he didn’t know what would happen. But “Samuel did as the Lord had commanded him”; he anointed the least of Jesse’s sons, a shepherd-boy named David.

Once again God would demonstrate that he can do the unexpected with unpromising material. Saint Paul was well aware of God’s amazing capability when he said:

For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. (I Cor 15:9)

He also reminded the Corinthians of how unlikely they were as God's servants:

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. 

In fact we find in the scriptures a pronounced tradition of choosing the lesser and the least: Abel over Cain, Jacob over Esau, Joseph over his brothers, and the Hebrews over the Egyptians.


God reserves the right to surprise and the wisest are those who look to the future with great hope and no particular expectation.