by Father James Rodriguez
There is a phrase we use when we say the creed each Sunday that I think we often gloss over. After proclaiming our belief in God as Father, we say that he created all things, “visible and invisible.”
It is well worth our time to think beyond the limits of our senses, to meditate on the invisible things God has created, the spiritual realities that surround us always, and the hidden ways in which he is always at work, whether or not we understand in the moment.
Through Isaiah, the Lord speaks to Cyrus, an unlikely link in the chain of our salvation.
He was a Persian king at the time of the Babylonian captivity, when the precious few remaining Jews longed to return to the land their ancestors claimed with Joshua about 1,000 years prior.
Through the reign of Cyrus, God brought about their liberation, and by the time Jesus was born, the people had reestablished their presence in Israel, though it was a far cry from their pre-exile glory days.
They longed for salvation, for a restoration of a kingdom with God as their head. In his own hidden way, he was setting the stage, liberating them through a foreign king, and then, when the time was right, coming himself as a baby in Bethlehem.
The God we worship is full of surprises!
His choice to be hidden is one of the signs of his ineffable love for us. Revealing his full glory and commanding our obedience would strip us of the freedom necessary to love him in return. It’s easy to lose sight of this, though, and to feel as if he is absent in difficult moments.
St. Paul encourages the Thessalonians, as well as us New Yorkers, to “work[s] of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope.”
He lived and died exhibiting these great virtues, providing us with yet another example of the discipleship that comes from friendship with Jesus. The Lord had captivated Paul’s heart, and with him Silvanus, Timothy, and countless others throughout the ages. May our names be numbered among those friends of God, and may we trust that he who seems hidden is closer than we are to ourselves.
In our Gospel today, we encounter the hypocritical Pharisees once again. The great tragedy of these men, and others like them, is that they could have had the intimacy with God that Jesus came to bring.
Their insistence that he conform to their image of God rather than the reality not only caused them to misunderstand him, but to reject him outright. This spurning of God is not gentle. It’s never gentle. In their case, it was physically violent, leading to his torture and death.
When we reject him, we become torture ourselves, voluntarily cutting ourselves off from the source of light and peace. In sin, we harm the work He wants to do in our souls, giving ourselves — the rightful property of God — to whatever form Caesar has taken in our lives.
We settle for lesser loves, to our destruction.
May this Sunday be a wake-up call to us all, drawing us into the loving embrace of the Father that so many of the Pharisees rejected. May we trust him like little children, finally giving him his due.
Readings for the Twenty-ninth
Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 45:1, 4-6
1 Thessalonians 1:1-5b
Matthew 22:15-2
Father James Rodriguez is the pastor of St. Rose of Lima in Rockaway Beach