“In Him we live
and move and have our being” – these words spoken by St
Paul to the people of Athens
In the first
reading Moses asks the question: “what great nation has its gods so close as
the Lord our God is to us when we call upon him? and what great nation is there that has laws
and customs to match this whole Law that I put before you today? Moses invites the people to listen and
to put this Law into practice and he gives the reason why - so that they may
have life! and may enter and take possession of the land which the Lord is
giving to them. For the Israelites we
know that this land was Canaan or Palestine but for us Christians its meaning
has been expanded beyond all imagining – St James in the second reading gives
us a clue as he re-echoes a similar message: “it is all that is good,
everything that is perfect which is given us from above; it comes down from the
Father of all light. By his own choice he
made us his children by the message of the truth” …. And then he invites us
to “listen and submit to the word which is planted in us and can save our
souls.” Possession of the land in the Old Testament can now be translated as
possession all the graces and blessings which have come to us through Christ –
in a word the gift of Salvation – belonging to the family of the Trinity – sharing
in the very relationship of the Son to the Father. In the Gospel Jesus warns us against
lip-service while our hearts are preoccupied with values contrary to his law – and
invites us to listen saying: “listen to me all of you and understand.”
All three readings
in one way or another invite us to listen - to look beyond the letter of
the Law to what God is offering – to enter our hearts and reflect on the
nearness of our God – to reflect on what we have received – the treasure which
we carry in our hearts often without our being consciously aware of it. Each and every human being has come forth
from the hand of a loving God and is sustained in existence until we return to
Him – “His is the breath that is in us and at his own bidding will He take it
away.” But for those of us who are
baptised and receive the Eucharist - we live by the very life of Christ - as we
have been hearing in the Gospel these past few weeks: “he who eats my flesh and
drinks by blood lives in me and I live in him.”
And again “if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his
blood you will not have life in you.” The
life which Moses promised the Israelites in return for obeying the Law was only
a shadow of the real life which God had in store for his people through Christ. All growth in prayer and in our relationship
with God implies that we become more and more aware of this treasure we carry
within us and claim it as our own.
With Moses we too
can exclaim: “what great nation has its
gods so near as the Lord is to us” – “for in Him we live and move and have our
being”.
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