By Fr Antony Christy, SDB –
Responding to the Faithfulness of the Lord
August 22, 2021: 21st Sunday in Ordinary time
Joshua 24: 1-2,15-18; Ephesians 5: 21-32; John 6: 60-69
The God of Israel has always been identified as the God of the Covenant: I shall be your God and you shall be my people. Through ups and downs, during plenty and calamities, in peace and war, the Lord ever remained faithful to the covenant. Even when the people went away from it and abandoned it, the Lord remained faithful and committed. That is why the people of Israel did not contain themselves with saying God is faithful, but believed firmly that God is Faithfulness!
Today we have Joshua who understands and expresses exactly what is expected of the people of God: as for me and my household, we shall always serve the Lord. Being faithful to God was not his initiative, Joshua knew it well. It was only in response to the faithfulness of God, responding to God the faithfulness.
Our relationship with God has to be a relationship of utmost fidelity, for there is no scope for deception and misrepresentation as the Lord knows everything, even the deepest of our thoughts and intentions. In God there is no duplicity, no ambiguity and no vagueness. God is faithful to the finest of details. As in the second reading today, the faithfulness of God is compared to the faithfulness that is observed in a marriage fidelity between the husband and the wife! It is a faithfulness of utmost sacrality and as much as it concerns the Lord, it is absolute!
We could be reminded here of an anecdote said about an old man, well in his nineties, who would come everyday to a dispensary to dress a wound on his thumb. As he waits his turn, if it gets near the mark of midday, he would get anxious and restless, telling the nurses to hurry up or to let him go, as he had to go to attend to his wife at noon! His wife was in a hospital room in a state of coma for the past one year! The nurses would ask him, ‘anyway, she would not know if you came on time or not, or even whether you were there or not, why do you give it so much of an importance to be there precisely at midday?’ The man would respond: ‘no, it does not matter to me whether she knows it or not, I have made a promise to her, to be at her side everyday at noon without fail, and I will keep my promise come what may!’ That is what the Lord’s fidelity is all about – keeping the promise!
Today the Word brings home to our minds three premises to consider in relation to the perfection of our Christian Faith. The first premise is that we are called to fidelity as a community of faith, as people of the alliance, as people of God. In front of the world today, which tries to get as far away from God as possible, we are called to proclaim as Joshua did: as for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord our God! We need to choose to live our faithfulness as a community, as a family.
The second premise, our call to faithfulness as families, begins right within our own families! Our faithfulness to God is concretely realised in our faithfulness in our family, between the spouses, between the parents and children, faithfulness to our responsibility to build up our families as building blocks of the Church, the family of God.
The third premise, we called as individuals, as sons and daughters of God to recognise the Words of eternal life that God alone has, so that our faithfulness can be manifested in our daily choices, fundamental priorities and concrete life style. In his lovely words, “to whom shall we go, Lord, for you have the words of eternal life,” Peter reminds us today that our fidelity to God does no good to God but gains us the eternal life that we long for. Our fidelity to the Faithfulness is a grace unto ourselves, to our families, to our community of faith, to our society and to the humanity as a whole!
It would be opportune during the course of this week, that each of us, spends a time of solitude, and asks oneself, how faithful am I to God’s fidelity, to God the Faithfulness!
Fr Antony Christy is a Salesian Priest from 2005, who has a Masters in Philosophy (specialisation in Religion) and a Masters in Theology (Specialisation in Catechetics). He is currently pursuing his doctoral research in Theology at Salesian Pontifical University, Rome. Walking with the Young towards a World of Peace and Dialogue is the passion that fires him.