Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

I think one of the most wonderful and, yes, difficult, things about what it means to be a Christian is reconciling ourselves to our inability to truly comprehend the unbounded, generous and gratuitous love of God. God’s love will always surprise us with its depthless depth and rapturously invite us into ever deeper relationship with the Mystery of Love that is God’s very life as well as the very ground of our own being. But our perennial tendency (that’s in constant need of undermining and challenging), is to think that we’ve got a handle on the wildness of God’s love; to think we’ve got it down, that we know how it works, that it’s ours to possess.

Take our reading from Luke appointed for today. Jesus has just returned from a period of trial and temptation in the wilderness, has entered the synagogue and has preached the good news that announces liberation, vision, and divine favor to the poor, the imprisoned, the oppressed and all those whose perception of the goodness of God has been limited or foreclosed by one form of death-centered tyranny or another.

Jesus’ crowd is very much on board here…until Jesus says something audacious. He makes the bold claim that a Zidonian widow and an unclean Syrian leper, foreigners very much outside the community of Israel, are actually the sorts of people that God loves and favors. That good news Jesus was talking about? It’s not anyone’s possession: the outsider, the foreigner, the alien or anyone we could possibly think of as unacceptable or unworthy—God has already accepted them without (can you imagine?) consulting anybody else; God in God’s immeasurable goodness has already deemed them worthy; the good news is completely and unreservedly for them.

Why should this make the crowd angry? Quite possibly they were under the impression that God’s love was something subject to scarcity; that if God were for the “outsider,” God couldn’t also be for the “insider” as well; that God wasn’t just theirs anymore.

But part of the joy of Jesus’ proclamation that Isaiah’s words were fulfilled in the people’s hearing is precisely to do with the fact that the proclamation of the good news is for everyone—that it’s actually terrifically good news for the “insiders” that the “outsiders” are so completely beloved because it means, in part, that their own belovedness isn’t contingent on the vicissitudes of human evaluations of worthiness or status, but grounded in God’s own free, gracious and eternal will to love us, all of us. We’re beloved not for anything we’ve done or could ever possibly do, but on account of who God is. There’s no scarcity to God’s love, no limit to God’s grace. And God’s love is not anyone’s to possess but everyone’s to share and to proclaim.

This is truly good news for everyone!— That God has delivered all of us from the tyranny of sin and death, from being in bondage to the (sometimes subtle) violence of categories like “insider” and “outsider” and is even now reconciling all things to God’s own self through Jesus Christ our Lord.

How might we more fully live the proclamation of this good news today and find ourselves ever more enraptured by and given to the boundless wildness of God’s love?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+