Thursday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 488

What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them
would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert
and go after the lost one until he finds it?

The Old and New Testaments do not describe a passive God who waits to see how things turn out. If he seems to be patient, it's because his plans take centuries and millennia to complete, not because he is inactive or dormant. And certainly not because he is killing time, as many of us do. Our impatience may expect something to happen very soon -- at least within a lifetime -- but the scriptures simply remind us, a thousand years are a moment in God's sight.

So when we consider the Good Shepherd we imagine a God who goes to great lengths and expends much energy to rescue his own. A good shepherd does not simply outwait his wayward sheep.

But we also recognize that the Lord allows creatures made in his own image and likeness -- that is, with essential freedom -- the space to make their choice. Love, by definition, is freely given and cannot be forced.

It is also a decision made in time, and not in eternity. It is never made once and for all, but must be worked out over a lifetime. 

Finally, God's satisfaction, toward which his patience is directed, is infinitely beyond our imagination, far more wonderful than ANYTHING! (...as if capitalizing the word might help.) God's satisfaction for which the Son of God was crucified, died and raised up is more joyous, more beautiful, and more amazing than the entire universe from its subatomic to macroscopic dimensions; and more astonishing than the several dimensions of space and time the scientists like to posit.

So of course it takes time.

And it's also beyond our mortal abilities to define or describe.

Some Christians say that God's will must be completed which includes the "salvation" of every soul from the most deserving to the least. Others will limit the number to the "once saved, always saved" set, those who received Jesus as their "Personal Lord and Savior" at some point in their lives. Still others imagine the saved as no more than 144,000, about the size of a small American town. (...which seems kind of disappointing to me though Saint John obviously considered it a huge, staggering amount.)

I'll just say, "It's beyond our comprehension!" and leave it at that.

Or as Saint Paul said, eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him,

I find it encouraging to ponder this mystery of God's goodness, especially its dynamic, active dimension. Our Shepherd has not abandoned us. Indeed he cannot leave us. We have only to watch.