Dominica I Passionis - When God Hides

PRESENTATION: Jesus Hid Himself

Each year on Passion Sunday, when we arrive at church we are greeted with the stark sight of the statues and images veiled. This is traditionally connected to the final verse of today’s Gospel passage, “They took up stones therefore to cast at him. But Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.”

Christ hid Himself because it was not yet the proper time to offer Himself up to the Father, but this was not the only time that Christ hid Himself. I am not referring to another occasion during His earthly life, but to occasions during our earthly lives. Many people have endured the experience of God hiding his presence from them. St. Teresa of Calcutta famously endured the Dark Night of the Soul for fifty years, never experiencing the presence of God during all that time.

King David attests to the universality of this experience when he wrote in the Twelfth Psalm, “How long, O Lord, wilt thou forget me unto the end? how long dost thou turn away thy face from me?”

It would seem that a God who is all-good would not leave us stumbling in the dark, especially in times of trial when we need Him the most. The reality of God’s hiddenness can be a cause for struggle in our faith life, and skeptics seize on it to claim that God does not exist.

Ultimately though, God’s hiddenness flows from His goodness and not in spite of it.

EXPLANATION: Why God hides

Traditionally we understand that God’s hiddenness at times is due to one of three causes.

First, Our Lord hides himself from the wicked, those who have placed themselves on the path to destruction, and refuse to turn back to Him. God hides Himself by abandoning them and letting them fall into other and greater sins and at last into eternal perdition.

Second, Our Lord will often hide Himself from those who offend Him, in order to punish them for their faults and defects. These are souls who are careless and heedless regarding their prayer and other spiritual exercises, or who even omit them all together, who are negligent about their regular observances and take little notice of venial sins, and who give entrance into their heart to inordinate affections for the things of this world. Is it any wonder that Our Lord would turn away and hide Himself from those who live far from Him and care little for His grace?

Finally, God can also hide Himself from the good to exercise their virtue by trials. He hides Himself from the good by depriving them of those lights and consolations that they once enjoyed, leaving them in aridity, in darkness and prey to doubts and scruples, by which it appears to them that God has turned away and abandoned them completely. He does this to give them the opportunity of exercising greater virtue.

When God sees fit to visit us with such aridity, it is in order to detach us from all created things, even from the happiness we may derive from devotion, so that we may learn to love God for His sake alone. He wants also, to humble us, by showing us that consolations are not our right, but entirely free gifts.

IMPLICATION: Seeking the face of God

When God seems distant and hidden, we may be tempted to seek Him out, or to give up, but the direction we should take is inward.

We must examine ourselves thoroughly, to see if God has withdrawn His goodness from us, due to our own faults and failings. If we find ourselves in this state, then we must have frequent and humble recourse to prayer. We must fervently petition Our Lord, that by His grace and mercy He would see fit to raise us from our sorry state, which may at any moment bring us to the edge of the precipice. At the same time we must not cease to be more on guard against sins and faults of all kinds, and more diligent in our exercises of piety.

If it happens that we find ourselves in this state of seeming abandonment without having given the Lord occasion to hide Himself by reason of our infidelity, then we can rest assured that God wishes in this way to try our constancy. As long as we persevere as before in serving God in prayer, and the practices of penance and mortification in the midst of our desolation, we will surely store up greater treasures of merit.

We must remind ourselves also, that even though Our Lord seems to be hidden from us, the more He is intimately present in our soul.

As the Season of Lent progresses, the Church deprives us of more and more. At the beginning of Septuagesima, She took from us the joyful strains of the Alleluia. Today, She deprives us of the sight of holy things. On Good Friday, She will deprive us of the Eucharistic presence of Our Lord in the tabernacle. Finally, as the Easter Vigil begins she will deprives us of sight itself as the church is plunged into darkness. But as Easter dawns, the glory of the Lord and the splendour of the Church will be returned to us.

This is our annual reminder that in our own lives, at times God may seem hidden from our sight, but He is not absent from us. If we remain faithful to Him, He will still provide us with His grace and strength, so that we might purify ourselves by our trials, and grow ever stronger in our love for Him.