A Personal Invitation

          In the best-selling novel The Shack, by William Paul Young, Mack Phillips goes for a walk with Jesus.  Along the way, Mack awkwardly comments that Jesus isn’t quite what he had imagined.  He thought Jesus would be, well, better looking.  Jesus laughed and said, “Once you really get to know me, it won’t matter to you.”[1]  Jesus extended a personal invitation to Mack to really get to know him.  Today’s readings teach us that Jesus offers that same personal invitation to each one of us, too.

          In our Gospel passage, John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask Jesus if he’s the Messiah, the one who is to come.  Jesus doesn’t offer a simple yes or no answer – he never does.  Rather, he invites John’s disciples to listen to his words and watch what he does so they can decide for themselves.  Each disciple must come to his own conclusion about whether Jesus is the one they’re waiting for.[2]  So Jesus extends to each one of them a personal invitation to really get to know him, to enter into a personal relationship with him. 

          The human experience can best be described as a journey.  We’re always seeking:  seeking truth; seeking justice; seeking peace; seeking love.  In other words, we’re always seeking God.  Whether we admit it or not, “[t]he deepest desire of the heart is to be connected with God,”[3] because it’s only in God that we’ll find all of these things in their perfection.  When we accept anything less, we’re dissatisfied, and we keep on seeking.  But when we enter into a personal relationship with God, we find exactly what we’re looking for, which is exactly what we need.  That’s what Saint Augustine meant when he said, “Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”[4]

          God never stops extending a personal invitation to each one of us to enter into a personal relationship with him – to really get to know him.  So much so that he came to us in human form (albeit apparently not a very good looking human form).  God came in human form so that we could better relate with him and through that relationship share in God’s eternal life.  “Eternal life is a relational event.  Man did not acquire it from himself or for himself alone.”[5]  In the incarnation, humanity and divinity are joined in perfect relationship.  “Through relationship with the one who is himself life, man too comes alive.”[6]  As our first reading and Gospel tell us, through relationship with Jesus, the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame leap and the mute rejoice in joyful song.

Now, it’s true that God personally invites each one of us into relationship with him, but God doesn’t force that relationship on us.  Whether or not we accept that invitation is our choice.  Our challenge is that a relationship with God through Jesus today is necessarily a spiritual relationship– it’s not physical or tangible.  We don’t have the benefit that the Apostles had of seeing Jesus with our own eyes, hearing him with our own ears, and touching him with our own hands.  So God can seem distant; Jesus, mythical; and the Holy Spirit, ethereal.  In the absence of concrete evidence of God’s presence in our lives, we look elsewhere, and we wander.  We wander into the mistaken belief that truth is found only in libraries and laboratories, justice in the courthouse, peace in the halls of government, and love in a puppy, and we’re never satisfied.  Unless and until we take that proverbial leap of faith, unless and until we enter into personal relationship with the one who never stops inviting us, we will never know true happiness.  

So how do we enter into a personal relationship with God?  Well, the first step is to move beyond the images and stories that form our basic understanding of God and invite God into every corner of our lives.  We need to include God in every conversation with our neighbor; thank God for every blessing in our lives; lean on God through every hardship; rejoice with God in every triumph; lead God into the deepest, darkest recesses of our lives and let him carry us out freed from every burden, cleansed of every sin and filled with his everlasting love.  When we consciously invite God into our lives, we’ll soon realize that he’s been there the whole time; we just weren’t paying attention to him.  Like every relationship, building a relationship with God takes time and patience, as Saint James warns us in our second reading.  But I can assure you, the rewards are out of this world.

          That’s what Mack discovered during his walk with Jesus.  Once Mack accepted God’s personal invitation to really get to know him, he realized that what he  knew about Jesus was only an icon, an ideal, an image through which he tried to grasp spirituality, but not the real person who loved him with God’s eternal, boundless love.  By entering into a personal relationship with Jesus, “Mack felt more clean and alive and well than he had since . . . well, he couldn’t remember when.”[7]  God is inviting you into a personal relationship with him, too.  Will you accept?

Readings:  Isaiah 35: 1-6a, 10; Psalm 146; James 5: 7-10; Matthew 11: 2-11

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[1] Wm. Paul Young, The Shack (Los Angeles, Windblown Media, 2007) at 120.

[2] John Shea, The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers: On Earth as It Is in Heaven, Matthew, Year A (Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 2004) at 37.

[3] Id. at 40.

[4] Augustine, The Confessions, Book I, Maria Boulding, trans. (New York, Random House, 1997) at 3.

[5] Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth – Holy Week:  From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2011) at 84.

[6] Id.

[7] Young at 122.