Do you know God?: Homily for Thursday, August 21, 2025

Jesus wanted us to know his Father. That’s why he came. Jesus is the profound and fundamental revelation of the Father. And so that we would not have to guess, Jesus establishes the Church. The Church helps us to know, well, what should we believe about God? What is the most important thing? The challenge, of course, is that we can be like Jephthah. Readings for Today.

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Do you know God?

When I was back in my days in Vermont, I worked in a school and there was a boy in this school who was not Catholic and not terribly enamored with faith. He wasn’t hostile per se, but he was not terribly interested. And years later, when he was an adult, I kind of became in touch with him again and he was very active in a Christian church. And I asked him, I said, “Well, what made the difference?” And he said, “Well, I woke up one day and realized that I knew a lot about Jesus, but I didn’t know Jesus.”

Today’s readings are really strange. You’ve got in the gospel the king desperate to bring people to the wedding feast. This poor guy at the end isn’t dressed properly. Well, he probably didn’t expect to go in the first place and boom, he’s cast out into the darkness, tied up.

The first reading is even stranger, really. We have this king, or not king, but he’s a judge, Jephthah, who makes this promise to God that the first person he sees coming on his return, he will sacrifice to the Lord. Now, this is strange on so many levels, not the least of which, he’s going home. He had to know that he was likely to encounter someone he knew, which makes this vow all the more strange.

What we have to understand in the midst of all of this is the context. There are things in this reading that if we’re not careful, we can really misunderstand. Jephthah wasn’t very popular with his brothers. He wasn’t, he was a brother by another mother, so to speak, and his mother was a prostitute, so he was ostracized from his family, which probably created in Jephthah the ability to be a good fighter. And when it became convenient for his brothers, they asked him to lead them into battle.

The problem is what’s going on around them at the time. There was an understanding that to be faithful to God, you had to appease God. You had to mitigate his anger, and the Northern Kingdom in particular was quite susceptible to child sacrifice, because by giving the most important thing to God, he would be appeased and most people would be better off. Not the child, of course, but everybody else.

And this was a constant temptation for the people in the North. Even the wise King Solomon fell prey to child sacrifice. And so when we look at Jephthah in this reading, he has an understanding of God that is quite wrong. He doesn’t really know God. He relies on his own sense of reason to discover what he thinks God wants. And the interesting thing is that even though the Spirit of the Lord has rushed upon him, he doesn’t pay careful enough attention to it to really get to know who it is that God is, what it is that God wants, what the expectations of God are. He loses sight of the two fundamental and foundational commandments of the Jewish faith and our own faith, loving God and loving neighbor.

But so convinced is he that he’s right, he can’t even pull the trigger when he sees that it’s his daughter, his only child. We can fall prey to that too. We can in our own lives have an understanding of who God is or what God expects that’s wrong. So how is it that we determine what it is that God really wants from us? It’s a tough question that doesn’t always have the simplest of answers, but there is a very important principle.

You see, Jesus did not want us to have to guess about things. Jesus wanted us to know his Father. That’s why he came. Jesus is the profound and fundamental revelation of the Father. And so that we would not have to guess, Jesus establishes the Church. The Church helps us to know, well, what should we believe about God? What is the most important thing? The challenge, of course, is that we can be like Jephthah.

I remember hearing a lot, I don’t hear it as much anymore, but I remember hearing a lot people who would justify what they wanted to happen by saying, “This is what Vatican II called for.” After a while, it became important for me to say, or to ask rather, “Where in the documents of Vatican II is that?”

Because most people didn’t know the documents of Vatican II. Most people would be quite surprised to hear what the church actually said. Most people would find it difficult in their own lives to find the place in those documents where some of the things that were done after the Second Vatican Council they were claiming were justified.

The Church becomes our guarantee that we know God for who God is. We know God as He is. We know not only about God, we know God. And we’re called to a personal relationship with Jesus. And so today, let us ask the Lord to pour forth the grace to help us to know God and to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

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