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In the name, of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
Time and again we read in the Gospel of the anger which the Lord Jesus
Christ provoked by performing an act of mercy, a miracle of healing on a
Sabbath day. And we cannot help asking ourselves a question: Why did He
do it so constantly, so persistently, with such insistence? Could it be
to challenge those who surrounded Him? Could it be to provoke them?
Could it be simply a pedagogical action?
I believe that there is a great deal more in His action. The Lord
created the world in six days; on the seventh day He rested of His toils
and labours. But what happened to the world then? The seventh day was
the day when the world came into the hands of man to be brought to its
fulfilment and to its completeness; the seventh day, the Sabbath of the
Lord is the day of man. The whole of human history falls in that day.
But God did not leave man to work alone as the Lord Jesus Christ says in
the Gospel, as reported by Saint John, ‘My Father still works, He shows
His work to His Son for Him to fulfil them’. And in another passage He
teaches us, He tells us that His judgment is true because it is not His
judgment; He hears the words of the Father and that is the judgment He
pronounces.
And so, history is the day of man, but man is called to be guided by the
wisdom, by the love of God. It is because we are so often seeking for
our own ways, it is because we do not ask ourselves what is God's way in
one situation or the other that the world has become so ugly, and so
frightening, and so tragic. There is a Hebrew poem that describes the
misery of this world into which man does not bring the love of God; it
says, ‘Man has ceased to believe in God and love has departed this
world. Men have hanged themselves in forests, have drowned themselves in
lakes, in rivers. Heaven is no longer mirrored in the lakes, in the
woods; the bird does no longer sing songs of paradise, and the Prophet
himself on his pedestal has become a mere statue.’
Is this not what we have become? Not statues but so much alike the wife
of Lot who turned back and who became a statue of salt. We have remained
salt and yet we are petrified, immobile, we do not fulfil on earth this
function of ours. And Christ shows us, by working His miracles, His acts
of love and of compassion on Sabbath day, time and again, He Who is the
only true man, the only man who is in total, ultimate oneness with God,
what our part should be: take on the history of mankind, take every
situation in which we or others find themselves, and carry them on our
shoulders in an act of mercy and of love. A Western writer has said that
a Christian is the one to whom God has committed the care of His world
and of other people. Are we discharging this basic central commission of
ours, do we care? We may care with tenderness, we may care sternly, but
we must care. And then, this seventh day when God in His mercy and love
has committed this world to our care, still can become the day of the
Lord. And the City of man which is been built without God, which so
often is like the Tower of Ваbel,
may still unfold and attain the greatness and the holiness of the City
of God in which the Lord Jesus Christ, true God but also true Man, is
called to be a citizen, the heart of it, but also one of us.
Is not this call great enough? Is not God's faith in us sufficiently
inspiring? Are we going to defeat His hope, to reject His love for
ourselves or for others? Or are we going to learn from the ways in which
Christ fulfils His human vocation in the day of the Lord, shall we not
learn from Him and together with Him build the world which God has
dreamed, has willed and is still loving in his distress and so often in
our betrayal of Him!
Let us learn to love one another actively, bear one another's burdens,
listen to the Living God when He speaks, listen with all our energy,
look into His ways and be those who fulfil His will and bring the world
to the perfect beauty He has willed for it! Amen.
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