Saturday of the Thirty-Second Week in Ordinary Time Yr 1 2025

Title

Waiting for God

Outline

We are an impatient, hasty folk, we humans

We want technology to do or help us do everything faster, more quickly, without waiting, whether it be computers which go ever faster to better road designs that obviate traffic lights. We do not like waiting our turn, whether at a doctor’s office or in the grocery store checkout. Our hastiness and impatience is true in 1000 other ways as well.

Then we meet up with God whose eternal now tests our patience

Jesus frustrates us with the parable of the unjust judge. He does eventually give justice, but only because he fears frustrating the widow too much and she shame him by striking him. He will not frustrate her too much so despite not caring a fig about justice or God he eventually acts.

God, says Jesus, is just and does care about us: will he not “then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night?” But why then do they need to cry out day and night? Jesus speaks the conundrum: “he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily.” Speedily? Yes, for he wants to develop faith or trust in them. Yes, for he wants to develop patience in them for their good. Yes, because he acts in his timing from the eternal now speedily at the right time for our good.

Wisdom pictures this in context

The people have waited for deliverance since the Pharoah turned against them. The chapter shows how his timing is just and right, just in balancing the evil the Egyptians did with the evil that happens at the Red Sea and in the death of the firstborn, and building faith and hope in the pairing of the unbelief of the Egyptians with the piety of the Israelites. But they are still surprised when as they are finishing off the Passover late at night God’s “all-powerful word from heaven’s royal throne leapt into the doomed land” and “filled every place with death” so their festival in drowned out by the sound of wailing and as dawn breaks they must hurriedly leave on their Exodus, wrapping up the unraised dough in their kneading troughs in their haste. It was the right time, but the Hebrews did not know it.

That is what God is teaching us

He teaches me, as one poet put it, that life is a given, a mystery that we can receive but not understand. Our waiting and frustration are God’s speedily for he is interested in building faith and trust. And that takes more work and patience on his part with someone like me who struggles with anxiety and wants the sudden miracle. It took 66 years of my life before the time was right in God’s eyes for me to come into the Church and another 10 months before I was ordained, but it was the right time. And that frustrating person in the grocery line or the traffic jam on the way to say mass are also right in God’s plan for to develop in his now the character that will prepare me for his presence that he has seen me entering always.

And I am sure that the same is true for you as well.