Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
In today’s gospel John the Baptist leaps for joy in the womb of his mother.
Can you give all to God?
It’s interesting when we read the Scripture because there are some things we might read that seem just a little odd. Take, for example, this story of Hannah and Samuel. Hannah has been barren. She hasn’t had a child. Particularly culturally, that was a sign of great shame.
It was a sign that somewhere God was not blessing Hannah and her husband because they didn’t have any children. There was a practicality in the midst of this as well because children were the ways in which the elderly were cared for. Children had an obligation to care for their parents. Not just a moral obligation, but an obligation under the Jewish law.
And so finally, she is blessed by God and has this son Samuel. And what immediately does she do? Gives him back. Gives him back to the Lord. Gives him over to Eli. Gives him to service of God totally and completely.
We don’t know what happens in the life of Hannah and her husband. We don’t get a sense of what their emotions may be. But we’re reminded always that our task in life can sometimes be complicated when we think that it’s up to us to figure out how things should be.
It’s an American problem. We look at a situation and we say, we know exactly what should be done in this circumstance. We look at other cultures in the world and we say, how could they be so backwards? Why can’t they be more like us?
I’m working on the insert for Holy Family. And one of the things that’s interesting to me, there are more single families, single parent families in the United States than anywhere else. Than anywhere else. Is that something worthy of imitation? Or is it, in fact, something where we have to think that our lives are much more about figuring out what God wants and asking and seeking the grace to do it?
Isn’t our faith really about seeking the wisdom of God? Where we think in our own lives, why does God believe this? Or why not believe? But why does God teach us this? Why does God want us to live this way or to do this thing? How many times have we read something in Scripture that we didn’t agree with and easily dismiss it?
How easy is it for us to dismiss the word of God? Because it doesn’t make sense in our modern culture. Both Hannah and the Blessed Virgin Mary saw the world through the eyes of God. Samuel is going to go on to be a phenomenal prophet with great difficulty. He’s even going to need to work on correcting the very man with whom he has left Eli.
Mary is going, of course, to go on to do great things in raising her son Jesus. But it’s going to be difficult for her as well. When was it that we had an experience where we recognized something that God wants us to do, but we just simply didn’t listen, or didn’t like it, or didn’t want to do it? It’s easy, in fact, to do those things that seem to make sense to us.
On a human level, it makes sense to help the poor, to give them drink and food and so forth. But what of other areas of our life? What about other moral decisions? What about the parts of the world that live life completely differently than we do? Let us ask the Lord as we prepare on the very precipice of Christmas to seek the Lord Jesus with all of our hearts, to place ourselves in his presence constantly, and to search out the wisdom that only God can give.
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