Today's brief gospel (Matthew 17: 10-13) is another of those episodes in which the disciples are invited to think a little deeper than the plainly obvious.
They are indulging in that favourite pastime of some believers to speculate about future prophesies. It is almost always a mistake. Of course there are literal and historical senses to Scripture, as the Chutch teaches, but when the reader treats the Sacred Scriptures like they are no more than a text in the world of information - as if they were a book of recipes or a set of technical instructions- then the reader is likely to bounce off the surface.
Proof that the Sacred Scriptures are more than mere information lies in the way Jesus speaks about John the Baptist as Elijah. He leaves it to the disciples to work this out. He does not make it clear for them. On most occasions, Jesus does not practise the pedagogy of OFSTED or follow the principles of the Campaign for Plain English.
Jesus stoops to pick us up in our sorry state of sin, for we are travellers waylaid on our way to Jericho. But one of the challenges of receiving His mercy is that as He picks us up, we must yield to His mystery; submit not only to the depth of His Truth but also to His way of communicating Himself to us. In this, we are like owls blinking in blinding sunlight, disoriented by the merging of mystery and truth, metaphor and symbol, and by the realities that these things point to. Was John the Baptist Elijah or was Elijah John? Not in any literal sense. But the convergence of these two heroes of faith in Jesus' discourse shows us something of God's mysterious mode of teaching, of inviting us to abandon our prosody and rise to the poetry of the Divine Mysteries.
People speak these days of love languages, and say that the real lover seeks to understand and communicate in the love language of the other. But God is different. While allowing for our weakness, God's love language is so much deeper and richer than ours because His love is so much richer and deeper than ours. If He stoops a little towards us, it is to make us go further up and further in to the reality that He is.
It is time to stop speculating and explaining (although these have their moment, of course). In these days before Christmas, it is time to pray for the grace to surrender ourselves to the radiance of His wisdom.
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