God loves us, but is surely exasperated
'Why are you terrified, Oh you of little faith?'
The number of issues where God continues to be exasperated is endless, already settled and evident in both Church documents and historical deliberations. The folks leaning over heaven’s mezzanine, those who have died to witness God’s truths, are pulling their hair out.
Tuesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Genesis 19:15-29
Matthew 8:23-27
It appears from today’s (Tuesday, July 2) gospel that God will get exasperated with us. The apostles are our witnesses, but also our embarrassment.
It’s not just drowning in the sea that brings up, “Dear God, what’s going on? Please, do something about this!” Our dear apostles were also troubled by feeding hordes of people, distraught over not catching fish, and upset that Jesus didn’t think they had enough faith.
Jesus famously, and often, responds, “Oh, you of little faith.”
Today, with both hindsight and extensive scriptural proof behind us, we can imagine that Jesus is not only the master of the obvious but also the master of the eye roll, muttering under his breath, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
We’re not worse than the apostles, mostly because Judas throws our comparative average with 1st Century Christians on obstinacy and cluelessness more toward our favor.
How is it that unfiltered scriptures haven’t won over more of us? I say unfiltered because the apostles wrote without spin, willing to admit both their failings and their sinfulness. No public relations team has been able to successfully clean up the scriptures to make them more palatable for non-believers. There’s a reason for that.
It took over 300 years for the Church to settle on the eventual ‘sacred’ contents of the biblical canon. That seems like a long time until you consider the litany of difficulties where heretical framing kept authoritative certainty at bay. People died over the arguments. Those battles resulted in extensive and painful doctrinal work that has sustained authoritative truth for centuries.
And here we are, a millennium and a half later. We have texts that most scholars admit have maintained a purity unrivaled by any other volume of collected writings, comprising the interwoven and divine orchestration for testimony of some 70 authors.
No one has ever won the battle for a rewrite, by the way. The texts remain ancient, surviving prayerful translations in hundreds of languages. That’s not just impressive, it’s unparalleled.
Also, why has the Eucharist become a hot potato between Christians? The Gospels, the letters, and the early Church fathers agree — even though it may seem counterintuitive to the boundaries of scientific limits — that we ingest the blood and flesh of Jesus in the holiest of our sacraments. It’s disputable, but not toward any winnable end.
The number of issues where God continues to be exasperated is endless, already settled and evident in both Church documents and historical deliberations. The folks leaning over heaven’s mezzanine, those who have died to witness God’s truths, are pulling their hair out.
Many Catholics justify abortion as a necessary option, ruling out any ultimate sacrifice on the part of the woman who carries a life, and blithely removing steps to assure all children a secure and safe family life, calling such efforts too difficult.
The list of moral, intellectual, political, scientific, and ethical shenanigans is too long to review.
Count them all, and the groans from Heaven must be thunderous.
He said to them, "Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?" Then he got up, rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was great calm. The men were amazed and said, "What sort of man is this, whom even the winds and the sea obey?"
Evidence doesn’t exist in just the eye of the beholder. It’s an essential piece in the puzzle of truth that we seem to forget, continually.
Note the miraculous turns of events in your own life. Don’t just remember the traumas, fears, worries, and frights. Review the interventions of God through every moment and the aftermath of unstoppable grace. That is, if you can imagine the exasperation from God when you respond only in the practiced refrain of, “Dear God, what is going on?”
Been there. Done that.
God is kind, but I’m certain that billions of times a second, he and his hosts have rolled their eyes at our unnecessary ignorance and muttered, “Are you kidding me?”