Daily Reflection Tuesday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time

The theme of all today’s readings is obviously God’s will. The gospel passage from Mark 3 today is found in all three Synoptic gospel accounts. It is a great promise of Jesus that surrendering our will, what we want, for what God knows is true (for God’s will is but another way of understanding truth itself), then we ourselves would become the brother, the sister, even the very mother of the Lord himself.
 
We talk of God’s will all the time. It is a prominent theme in both testaments of the bible (as seen in Psalm 40 today where verse 8, Here am I Lord, I come to do your will, is our response). Yet we are often confused, troubled and even frightened by what we think God’s will means. We may tend to think of it as some alien (that is, outside) force that tries to impose itself on us, rather than see it as the very center of our being and the greatest gift of God’s love. This confusion goes along with our often imagining that God is somehow “micro-managing” the universe, that everything that happens is directly caused by God. Why did God do this, we ask or even worse, why has God allowed this to happen? God brings health and happiness to this one, but to another, sickness and sorrow. Fair weather here, but there, the deadly hurricane and the flood. That kind of understanding of God is far too pat, too shallow for the ultimate mystery that is almighty God and God’s presence in the world, not to mention that it makes God into something of a monster, wreaking horrors here while bringing peace and prosperity elsewhere, like some awful cosmic game of dice.
 
Or we are frightened that God’s will is another way of saying that we will be tasked with some enormous burden that will overwhelm if not down-right crush us (completely ignoring or not believing what Jesus told us that, “My yoke is easy and my burden light”). We think of the rich young man who asked what he must do and Jesus telling him to sell everything he had and give the money to the poor and then (and only then, it seems) to follow him. We’re fearful that God’s will means we will have to do some incredible thing (like so many saints are depicted as doing) that seems so totally beyond us, totally beyond anyone, really. We forget (conveniently, it seems) that before Jesus told the rich young man to sell it all, he simply told him to follow the ten commandments (not terribly onerous the last time I read them!). “Do this and you will live,” Jesus told him. It was only after the young man asked what more he could do (we need to be spiritually ready before we dare to ask Jesus what more we can do, because Jesus will always tell us and it will never be what we expected!) that Jesus, looking at him with love (as Mark tells us in his account of this meeting), told him (if he desired to be perfect) to go and sell everything. But Jesus knew that that would set him free, and Jesus never stood and told everyone to go and sell everything they have, only the rich young man.
 
God’s will, if we would only believe it, would set us free also. God’s will is just another way of saying that God loves all of us as much as we can possibly be loved, no matter what, and that God wants, in the words of Psalm 23, only goodness and kindness to follow us all the days of our life. If we did only God’s will, all fear would disappear, everything would feel effortless and full of joy. We would cease worrying and fretting, we would find perfect forgiveness of everyone and forgiveness of ourselves. We would relax and let God lead us and feed us with the finest wheat. Our confusion and anxiety would simply fade away. How can we go wrong if we strive only to do what God asks us to do?
 
To the response, yes, but how do I know what God’s will is for me, I suggest that we begin by just trying to accept everything that happens to us as well as accepting everyone we meet, everyone we know, as they are, not as we wish they were. God is somehow in everything that happens to us (which is very different than saying that God has caused it), in every person we meet. It is only we who refuse to really believe that. God is in every rebuke, every person we find so annoying or hard to take, every uncomfortable even tragic experience, every sorrow and pain, every struggle and failure, if we would only believe that. They are all an invitation, a suggestion from the depths of God’s love, to go beyond the obvious, the surface, to the deep waters of the Spirit that plums all depths. They are all God saying to us, “Come up higher!” God’s will would then simply find us, we wouldn’t have to go anxiously hunting for it. If we would but believe that and simply say to ourselves, “I do not know why this is happening, I do not understand how God is present in this, but I believe God is close to me through it all” (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are at my side), if we would cease trying to figure it out, trying to get the answer to the why we are always insisting on asking, and just accept it all without any judgements or labels (this is good; this is bad) while being utterly honest with ourselves and others, praying constantly for trust in God (I Lift up my eyes to the mountains Ps 121), constantly to just accept it all without questioning, Then your light shall break forth like the dawn… then you shall call, and the LORD will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am!” Is 58:8-9