FIRST READING: Michah 5: 1-4. Thus says the Lord: You, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days. Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in travail has brought forth; then the rest of his brethren shall return to the people of Israel. And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they shall dwell secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth. And this shall be peace.
SECOND READING: Hebrews 10: 5-10. When Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired, but a body hast thou prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings thou hast taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God,’ as it is written of me in the roll of the book.” When he said above, “Thou has neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), then he added, “Lo, I have come to do thy will.” He abolishes the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
GOSPEL: Luke 1: 39-45. Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a city of Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.
____________________
Back in 1997 my eye was caught by a title of a novel written by Indian-born Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (HarperCollins, New York). I immediately bought the book because, within its folds, I had expected to find some kind of exploration of what the title seemed to promise. Instead, I was given a story of child marriages in India and, of course, as might be expected, later forbidden loves. Despite the novel’s merit on other counts, in this I had been disappointed: it said very little about the ‘small things’ with which God seems to be so captivated. At least, that’s what the Bible proclaims.
I see ‘small’ people all the time around me – poor people in obscure villages, children growing up in the inner city, single parents struggling to make it, prisoners, refugees, landless farmers, illegal immigrants, women, disoriented young people, vagrants, the elderly, those caught up in war, people struggling to make a living ... The world seems to be full of them: people without names; without a history; without respect and, sometimes, recognition from the ‘big’ ones who play the game of powerful politics. Nonetheless, they are God’s dearest treasures.
Jesus himself had been ‘small’. This is what had been proclaimed by the prophet Michah in the second half of the 8th-century during the time of the ‘big’ kings of Israel: the great ruler of Israel, the great one of old, the great liberator, the great provider, the majestic, the great peace-maker ... shall be small, just like his small birth-town of Bethlehem (the former Ephrathah; today’s Beit Lehem), which belonged to the smallest of Judah’s clans.
‘Small’, also, was Mary, Jesus’ mother, and ‘small’ were Zechariah and Elizabeth, just as ‘small’ was the latter’s village in the south-west hills of Jerusalem (today’s Ain Karem), 50 miles away from Beit Lehem, and ‘small’ was their home, as the evangelist suggests.
These texts are all permeated with a picture of smallness, of unimportance, or triviality, of insignificance, of minor people, towns and actions. This is in perfect concord with the depiction of smallness in the whole of the Bible. And yet, it is precisely this smallness, as the Pauline writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews proclaims, which makes real difference; which effectively “abolishes” the ‘big’ and powerful; which “sanctifies” the ‘small’ through Jesus “once for all”.
Indeed, God is the God of small things.
No comments:
Post a Comment