Memorial of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Religious
November 17, 2020
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 15 which often is called an ‘entrance liturgy’, where a worshipper asks the conditions of entering the worship place and a priest answers.
The psalm’s first line, not included in today’s verses, asks that question of the Lord:
LORD, who may abide in your tent?
Psalm 15:1
Who may dwell on your holy mountain?
Reading this line immediately reminded me of Jesus’s first encounter with his chosen twelve. Upon meeting Jesus, and obviously struck with his unique charisma, the disciples ask, “Lord, where do you live?”. They want to be with him, to learn about him. We do too.
It’s a gift to be invited to someone’s home – to see where and how they live, to share their dailyness. It is a first portal to the intimacy of friendship, a gift beyond price when it proves mutual and true.
In today’s Gospel, in a sort of reverse proposal, Jesus invites himself to dinner at Zaccheus’s home. Throughout all the Gospels, we often see Jesus inviting and accepting invitations which prove to be conversions and calls for his followers.
In the reading from Revelation, the invitation takes an apocalyptic and corrective tone, but its heart is the same. In essence, God invites us to an intimacy of which we are capable only under certain conditions, i.e. “if you hear my voice“:
Behold, I stand at the door and knock.
If you hear my voice and open the door,
then I will enter and dine with you,
and you with me.
I will give the victor the right
to sit with me on my throne,
as I myself first won the victory
and sit with my Father on his throne.
Today’s segment from Psalm 15 tells us what some of those conditions look like. It says to be someone who:
- walks blamelessly and does justice
- thinks the truth in your heart
- slanders not with your tongue.
- harms not your fellow human beings,
- takes up no reproach against your neighbor
- despises not the reprobate
- honors those who fear the LORD
- lends not your money at usury
- accepts no bribe against the innocent
Our challenge from the psalm is to meditate on that list to see what such behavior looks like in modern terms. Beneath the psalmist’s ancient language, we might discover our attitudes and examine our conscience toward issues like:
- criminal justice
- capital punishment
- war
- poverty
- immigration policy
- refugee resettlement
- propagandist media
- economic equity
- felon rehabilitation
- respect for other religions
- political oppression
- – just to suggest a few.
Psalm 15 tells us, and our other readings affirm, that the one who gets these things right not only gets invited, but gets to remain in God’s house, God’s “tent”.
The one who does these things
shall never be disturbed.
I know that’s Who I want to go eternally camping with! How about you?
Poem: Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours
You, neighbor God, if sometimes in the night I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so only because I seldom hear you breathe and know: you are alone. And should you need a drink, no one is there to reach it to you, groping in the dark. Always I hearken. Give but a small sign. I am quite near. Between us there is but a narrow wall, and by sheer chance; for it would take merely a call from your lips or from mine to break it down, and that without a sound. The wall is builded of your images. They stand before you hiding you like names. And when the light within me blazes high that in my inmost soul I know you by, the radiance is squandered on their frames. And then my senses, which too soon grow lame, exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.
Music: Dwelling Place – John Foley, SJ
Lavish Mercy 