The Third Sunday in Ordinary Time [C]
Nehemiah 8:2-4,5-6,8-10  +  1 Corinthians 12:12-30  +  Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21

When you’re little, your imagination helps you fill in the gaps about all the things in the world that you don’t understand completely.  When I was a boy, I did not think very much about becoming a priest.  I never seriously thought about being a priest until my freshman year of college when I was at K-State.  Maybe one reason that I didn’t think much about entering the seminary when I was little was because of what my imagination told me that the seminary must be like.  For whatever reason, when I was a little boy I thought that life in the seminary consisted chiefly of two things:  kneeling on wooden kneelers for hours on end, and memorizing all the names of the popes.  When as a boy I learned that there were over two hundred sixty popes, I gave up thinking about the seminary.

Why does our imagination want to fill in the gaps about things that we don’t understand?  It’s pretty simple, really.  No one likes to be ignorant.  No one likes to be in the dark.  Everyone by nature desires to know.

Imagine that you were given a bag of 500 jigsaw puzzle pieces, but were not given the box displaying the picture that the pieces make.  You would probably be able to put many of those puzzle pieces together, two pieces at a time.  But eventually you would also form an idea about what the overall picture looks like, and if your imagination were correct, that would make it easier to find two pieces to fit together.  The point is that our imagination by nature fills out pictures that we only have pieces of.

This is true of our Catholic Faith, as well.  That makes sense.  After all, one of the key words of our Catholic Faith is the word “mystery”.  Understanding our Catholic Faith, and living the spiritual life that flows from it, are filled with mysteries that go beyond what our imagination can help us picture.

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When I was a boy, I loved mysteries, but not the sort of mysteries that make up our Catholic Faith.  I read lots of mystery stories when I was a boy.  First I read all the stories of the Bobbsey Twins, and then the stories of the Hardy Boys, and then I graduated to Sherlock Holmes.  I devoured all fifty-six short stories and four novels about the world’s greatest detective.  Every mystery story presents a mystery that challenges the reader to piece together the clues leading to the solution of the mystery.

The great thing about such stories is that there always is a solution that we can thoroughly figure out.  I as the reader may not be smart enough to figure out what that solution is until the last page, but the solution is there all along.  The mystery is just a veil that hides the solution from my sight.

The mysteries of faith are different in an important way, because the mysteries of our Catholic Faith resist any ultimate solution.  If we go about reading God’s Word in one of the books of the Bible—like Ezra in today’s First Reading, or Our Lord Jesus in the Gospel passage—and if expect God’s mysteries to be solved by the end of the book, we’re going to be disappointed.

That’s not to say that the Bible makes no sense, or that we cannot make headway in exploring the mysteries of our Faith.  In the First Reading, “Ezra read plainly from the book of the law of God, interpreting it so that all could understand”.  Likewise, in his second letter to Timothy, St. Paul instructs us that the “sacred scriptures… are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.  All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness” [2 Timothy 3:15-16].

So when it comes to God’s sacred mysteries, there’s a tension between what can be grasped and what remains elusive.  This tension was captured by the layman St. Thomas More.  About 1500 years after the New Testament was composed, St. Thomas More wrote that Holy Scripture is “so marvelously tempered, that a mouse may wade there…, and an elephant be drowned…” [Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, I, 25].

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In the light of these sacred mysteries, with all its tension between reason and faith, how are we meant to live out our Catholic Faith?  There are two opposite extremes that we need to avoid.  The approach that the Church shows us to take falls between these two extremes.  But the more common extreme in our own day is the one we need to be more cautious of.

One extreme is the crutch of rejecting everything that is mysterious.  Those who resort to this extreme only deal with mysteries, if they do at all, in order to solve them and move beyond them.  Mystery as mystery has no value.

One of the chief examples in our modern culture of such extremists are secular scientists:  those who believe that the universe is made only of matter; only of what can be measured; only of what can be manipulated.  Of course, this sort of scientist also has a counterpart in ordinary society today.  This common man counterpart is skeptical of anything he cannot see and touch with his own senses; that he cannot judge and evaluate; that he cannot put in its place.

But you have to wonder:  what do these secular scientists and common man skeptics make of love?  After all, love is not made of matter.  You cannot examine love under a microscope.  You cannot put love in its place.  Does it not exist, then, or is it simply a mystery not worth bothering about?  Or is love just an illusion caused by neurons firing in the brain, with no real substance of its own?

Love is a mystery, and as St. John writes in his first New Testament letter, “God is love” [1 John 4:8 and 4:16].  So if God is infinite love, He is infinite Mystery.

God is infinite Mystery.  God in not made of matter.  You cannot examine God under a microscope.  You cannot put God in His place.

Unfortunately, there are many Christians who try to do just that.  Three are many Christians who believe that they can put God in a box, as if God is something that they can control, and measure, and figure out.  This way of dealing with God has many things wrong with it, but the most disastrous is the truth that God is absolute Mystery, and if my approach in life is to avoid whatever cannot be controlled, then I must forfeit a relationship with God Himself.

So how, then, can we approach and possibly even explore and enter into this Mystery?  It’s not possible through objective, rational knowledge, but through a heart-to-heart relationship that God initiates by speaking to us His Word.

Unfortunately, many Christians—and as a man, I will admit, many men—are not comfortable with talking about a relationship with God.  Many men, for whatever reason, have difficulty with relationships.  They prefer to live their lives according to the work that they accomplish, and the money that they earn.  Those are not bad things:  in fact, they’re necessary in this world here below.  But they don’t go to the heart of a relationship.

A relationship, by definition, is a mystery.  A relationship is a mystery because it involves an “other”:  that is to say, an other person.  Not a fact that I can memorize; not a problem to be solved; not a job to be accomplished; not a paycheck to be earned.  In a relationship, I stand before an “other”, who is a mystery and whom I cannot control.  Because of this, a relationship is always open-ended, as opposed to the way in which I relate to fact and figures, jobs and money.

This is part of what we see in today’s Gospel passage.  The passage about Jesus in the synagogue follows immediately after Satan tempting Jesus in the desert, which in turn follows the narrative of Jesus’ baptism.  In other words, this is the beginning of Jesus’ three years of public ministry.  In the town “where He had grown up”, Jesus goes “according to His custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day”.  In other words, He was in a place very familiar to Him, and He in turn was familiar to those in the synagogue that day.  No mystery here!  It’s all very comfortable.

But then something happens to break the sense of custom and familiarity.  Jesus proclaims a passage from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, and after doing so He tells the others in the synagogue, “‘Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.’”  That’s a striking thing to say, that a passage of the Old Testament has been fulfilled right here and now.  This isn’t what the average Jewish person would have expected to hear when he went to the synagogue on the sabbath.  After Jesus proclaims the passage from Isaiah and sits down, “the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at Him.”  This was a mystery that they could not explain.

Still early on in this new Church year—today being just the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time—it’s good for us to focus on the fundamentals of our Catholic Faith.  The whole of our Faith focuses on this divine Person, Jesus of Nazareth, who is God’s Word made Flesh.  This Person is true God and true man, and founded a church that—He insisted—the gates of Hell would never prevail against.  This Person offered up on a cross His own Body and Blood, soul and divinity.  This is the same Person who becomes truly and substantially present on the altar in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and from there within the soul of the person who enters into relationship with Him, and worthily receives Him.  God offers us this Word made Flesh.  How will you reply to Him?