Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38
The worldwide news is always full of disasters, which is certainly not surprising, since nothing in this universe is permanent. Still, you can’t help but wonder about how God can love and care for an individual, since so many people live and die each day. I read that the tsunami in Indonesia last year killed over 200,000 people! Thanks to the internet, we can access a world population clock. Here’s what it showed on October 31:
U.S.: 310,606,330
World: 6,878,635,170
21:29 UTC (EST+5) Oct 31, 2010
If we are all brothers and sisters, how can God love ME, when I have nearly 7 billion siblings? Such thinking is a bit humbling to our egos.
In the reading from 2 Thessalonians, Paul was dealing with a community really upset by the rumor that the second coming of the Lord had already occurred and that they had been left behind! In a way, they are like Job, as if saying: “Here I am, sitting out here scratching my diseased body, and the favor of the Lord is somewhere else!” Job finds within himself the faith to say: No. “I know that my Redeemer lives and that at last…after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God…” (Job 19:25-26).
If you believe that the world will end in 2012, you can smile at the prediction that your health care benefits will run out in 2014.
To the Thessalonians, Paul not only condemns the rumors as false, he says, in effect: “How could the Lord leave you behind, when you are His beloved ones? You are special to Him, ‘first fruits’ of His Resurrection!” “But,” they might ask as we do today, “what about the Second Coming? Don’t I get to laugh at all those predictions of calamity after 2012 because that will be AFTER the Second Coming.”
Dare we interpret what Paul and Job are implying? “Forget about the Second Coming, because you are beloved of God!” Rest in His love. Laugh at calamity. Find the deep peace that can be within you when your skin may be abscessed but your heart sees the reality of God’s presence. This is a coming of God to you, only He’s always been there, but it is so surprising to become aware of His presence that it may appear to you that He has just arrived.
The Psalmist has such faith. He does not hesitate to address the Lord, and expects an answer. He also expects that God looks upon him as a precious individual: “Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings from the wicked…” (Ps.17: 8-9).
And so we come back to Jesus’ words in Luke’s Gospel: “God is not the God of the dead but of the living. All are alive for him” (Luke 20:38).
I asked my wife the other day: “How many galaxies do you think there are?” [She has to put up with such questions from me now and then, now that our children are grown]. I looked up the answer on the NASA site. It reported that the Hubble Space Telescope estimated in 1999 that there were 125 billion of them. Astronomers estimate that small galaxies have between a million and a billion stars in them. Big ones have billions of stars. Such thinking usually leads us to Psalm 8 (“What is man that you should be mindful of him?”), but it can also lead us to be completely in awe of our own belief that the creator of all this didn’t pass us by, does not ignore us, is as close to us as life itself. As in last week’s story about Zaccheus, we hear him pause by whatever tree we are up in and invite us to dinner.
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