5th Sunday: The Love and Majesty of God

Click Here for the Sunday Mass Readings - 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C):

If someone gave you the opportunity to get in the way of God's plan, or say "no" to His plan outright, undoubtedly you would refuse the offer.  I have yet to meet someone of good will and sound mind who consciously attempts to obstruct or even pervert the plan of God in his life.  Happily, most of the human race can stand under the banner of "men and women of good will".  This is no guarantee, as we will see in this Sunday's readings, that we will not be tempted to back down from the greatness to which God calls us. 

This Sunday's readings lead us to reflect on different dimensions of God's plan for each and every human person.  His plan is one of majesty and glory which calls us to set out into deep, uncharted waters.  All of us have some notion of God or another, but no one expects what God really has in store for man.  We cannot imagine His love nor the greatness of His plan for us.  When we catch a glimpse of it we are reduced to awe and fear.  This was Isaiah's reaction in the first reading and the reason St. Peter asked Christ to leave him in today's Gospel.  The miracles of Christ and the work of God exceed our human capacity to understand - God is greater than the human mind, and more expansive than man's limited experience.

The second reading gives us a further perspective of the revelation of God: in the person of St. Paul it offers us an image of the interior transformation that this experience can bring about in the human person.  The reading differs from the other two insofar as we are not dealing with the actual moment in which God revealed Himself to Paul.  Instead we see the effects this revelation had on Paul years after it took place; we see the mature fruit that the revelation of God's majesty and plan bore in the depths of Paul's being.  We see a man of exceedingly mature and humble faith - sure signs that someone has really experienced and felt the awesomeness of what God has in store for him.

Paul, just as Isaiah and Peter, felt his entire existence unravel at the revelation of God's love and majesty, but we can also perceive in the second reading how this became the source of Paul's humility, faith, and apostolic zeal.  He was able to get over and move beyond himself, beyond his embarrassment at persecuting Christ, and was able to accept the majesty of God's plan for him, notwithstanding all the evil he had done.  Paul did not pretend he had never sinned, but as we hear in the second reading, he freely acknowledged both the calling of God and his own unworthiness: "For I am the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God."  With the profound understanding of God's love and will, and an equally profound understanding of his own unworthiness (which he never allowed to become an obstacle to accomplishing God's plan), Paul arrives at a simple conclusion: "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective."  This conclusion represents an inner reconciliation between God's love and Paul's own unworthiness.

Let us never fear the awesomeness of God's love and plan, but welcome it in humility and faith, and "set out into the deep," as John Paul II often encouraged us - moving beyond our comfortable shores for the glory of God and the salvation of our brothers and sisters.  May we never accept the temptation to look first to ourselves or our unworthiness, but may our gaze remain fixed on Christ and the greatness of His plan.

We will have several opportunities this coming week to continue pondering the interior transformation that Christ calls all of us to through a personal encounter with Him.  God bless you and have a beautiful Sunday.