Or to put it another way: following the elections, our lives have resumed… more or less well, let’s face it… But isn’t God always in our daily lives, or is he really?
God sends prophets. Not to signal the end of playtime, but to awaken the Hebrews’ conscience. They should live by God’s Law, in the land given to them for it, and so receive its blessings. They cringe when the prophet (Amos in this case on Sunday) arrives and calls out to them, even though he has come to shake them out of the torpor into which sin, estrangement and forgetfulness of God have sunk them… nicely!
The end of the adventure is unhoped-for: to experience the happiness of being with God, of being in God! Discover His greatness, His majesty, His power, His goodness, His love… and live by it. To be God’s partner to the point of becoming God’s son/daughter in the only-begotten Son. Who hasn’t dreamed of “making a legacy” that would transform their everyday life? In today’s (wonderful) prologue to St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, God reveals to us the mystery of our human vocation[1]… and would we excuse ourselves for neglecting him through our ingratitude and complacency? ” Woe to the rich ” said God in St. Luke… indeed, ” the band of the wallowing will exist no more ” (whether ‘rich’ or not) says the prophet Amos (6, 7). And we don’t see that we’re in this situation… The path is steep and sometimes despised: why does Christ send his disciples into such vulnerability? ” Put on sandals, don’t take a spare tunic. ” … “Stay where you are welcomed ” (without fear of leaving if you are not welcomed) … Such destitution and fragility or dependence on events and people should catch the eye. Would God abandon His own? Could it be that He’s making them jump into the lion’s den? Or could it be that it’s so serious that we have to take the means: charity with our bare hands, not our shells!
Indeed, without God, the Apostle sent on this mission could not “hold on”, so acute is his vulnerability. so acute is his vulnerability. At the same time, even the slightest protection would be mistaken for a shell and become suspect. But God, their comfort, shows his power… as much as the drama. Men’s lives are played out against the devil, and not just in a playground, even one the size of the world. It is to God that their hardened, disdainful and ungrateful hearts must be converted.
“ Without God we cannot live “, we could say, transforming these words of the martyrs[2] so little! But is it really in our hearts, in our minds, and in the way we think about our lives, and even… our vacations?
[1] St Paul to the Ephesians Ch 1… enough to fill any sleeping Christian with wonder!
[2]. ” Without Sunday, we cannot live ” said the martyrs of Abitene (Tunisia; 304 persecution by Diocletian)…
