Week 20—Sunday Mark 2:15-19
Mark 2:15-19
“THE COLDNESS OF A BODILESS INFINITY”
We continue to look at the passages which tell us of the Word become flesh. “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel (which means, God with us)” (Matt. 1:23). He had to be with us, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, and yet he would be “God” with us. Like us and unlike us. God could not redeem us seated in awful grandeur apart from the tragedy and pain of the world—God had to come as a person. God had to show us God’s heart or we would never have believed it.
This quotation is from a Hindu religious journal:
Now the home was empty—bereft of light, music, laughter and love. He was alone with his own thinking self and God—God that Mighty, Unknown Prayer to Whom for millions of ages Creation has cried and prayed and wept—God, that majestic Silence which is never disturbed for all the clamour of men—which creates and kills at a breath, and no reason given—which is Light and Darkness, Gladness and Sorrow, Love and Hate in one—and which we instinctively worship in all creeds, not so much because we Will but because we Must. . . . But it is natural to weak man to prefer the warm tenderness of a woman’s arms about him to the coldness of a bodiless Infinity, no matter how full of exquisite promise and suggestion that Infinity may be.
Note: “the coldness of a bodiless Infinity.” That is the view of God when there is no face on God. As we have said the Incarnation puts a face on God—God visiting and redeeming us. The God without a face is the God without worshipers. You cannot say your prayers to the multiplication table, nor to the law of gravitation, however true they maybe.
O Jesus, you are God approachable, God lovable, God simplified, God with a Face. I thank you, Blessed One, that in you we worship not “the coldness of a bodiless Infinity,” but the warm tender Finite—Infinite. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: In Jesus, the Holy becomes the approachable, even by the unholy. So I can come.