Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 106

There is no god besides you who have the care of all, that you need show you have not unjustly condemned. For your might is the source of justice; your mastery over all things makes you lenient to all.

Today's first reading from the Book of Wisdom offers philosophical reflections on the nature of God. God can afford to be just because he is all-powerful; there are no rival gods to contest God's apparent weakness when he forgives sin or assists the lowly. A recent poster affirms the same principle, to the effect: "True strength is gentle; gentleness is strong."  

Being a Franciscan with our tradition of preferring minoritas, I have sometimes hesitated to speak of God as all-powerful. I fear the "spirituality of power" which worships such a god. If we aspire to be the god we worship, an all-powerful god encourages avarice. I see this aspiration in ads for vehicles, guns, pain killers, and computers; and in American celebrations, especially football. How many wars has our nation lost against poverty, drugs, illiteracy, and disease because we intended to overpower them? A warlike nation worships power and would wage war on any one and anything it despises. 

When I go to Bethlehem or Calvary I don't gaze upon an all-powerful god. Rather, I see a God who embraces our weakness and frailty in the face of an increasingly complex, mechanized, domineering society. Jesus died because he was not most fit, most powerful, or most adaptable. He died on Calvary as any mortal would. 

So I've had my reservations about the "All-Powerful God," but recently I recognized another dimension of power; and I see the Lord's rightful claim to all-power. It's there in the expression, "He conquered death." 

Even though we killed him, he is still here! He remains with us. His terrible death, accepted with such grace that a centurion would declare, "Truly this man was the Son of God!" -- made him fully and entirely present to every human being of the past, present, and future. The cross closed the distances between him and different genders, races, tribes, classes, and religions. He is one of us and one of them. He greets us on Easter Sunday as if he never left. 

Despite our desperate efforts to rid ourselves of God once and for all, he says, "Here I am with you!" Jeanne Murray Walker has a wonderful poem entitled appropriately, Staying Power, published in Poetry Magazine, May 2004. 

God's persistent presence with us may be saddened but is never discouraged. Like Ms. Walker, George Herbert, the seventeenth century English priest/poet found God's consoling, immediate presence in his most desperate moments: 

Affliction III

 

MY heart did heave, and there came forth, O God!

By that I knew that thou wast in the grief,

To guide and govern it to my relief,

       Making a scepter of the rod:

          Hadst thou not had thy part,

Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.

But since thy breath gave me both life and shape,

Thou knowst my tallies; and when there’s assign’d

So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behinde?

       Or if some yeares with it escape,

          The sigh then onely is

A gale to bring me sooner to my blisse.

Thy life on earth was grief, and thou art still

Constant unto it, making it to be

A point of honour, now to grieve in me,

       And in thy members suffer ill.

          They who lament one crosse,

Thou dying dayly, praise thee to thy losse.

If we cannot find God it's often because we're not willing to go to that dark place of grief, shame, or guilt where God waits for us. He is closer to me than I am to myself. 

In that frightful distress we encounter the All-Powerful God who forgives, heals, comforts, and guides. He walks with us in the darkness of our fears. Powerful motorcycles, locomotive engines, nuclear bombs and other "man-made" devices are impotent before the One whom death could not destroy. If we're astonished by the strength of hurricanes and the dimensions of supernovas, we're silenced by the power of God to abide with us in painful loneliness. 

Saint Paul, in today's second reading, also describes the reassuring presence of God whose power is shown in weakness: 

The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness;

for we do not know how to pray as we ought,

but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.

As the Father accompanied Moses and the Hebrews in the desert, the Son of the Father assures us, "I am with you always, even to the end of the age."