Sacred and Intimate

The texts in the Roman Catholic lectionary, today, offer a line of reflection around intercession and the distance between humanity and Divinity. The texts from Isaiah reflect a realization of the promises of the prophet coming to fruition in the illness of Hezekiah and the appeal of the sinful one to avoid his fate of eternal damnation. The prophet Isaiah intercedes for Hezekiah and the mercy and forgiveness of the Divine is demonstrated. Matthew tells of Jesus questioning some of this ‘distance” from the Divine by posing a response to the “harvesting” of some grain to eat on the Sabbath. Humanity has a sense of sacred which can be visited by looking at a baby or billion stars in the sky. We need to preserve, revere, set aside, make special all the sacred genetic, cultural and spiritual events which connect with that sense of sacred. Christian history, perhaps from the time of Paul, has indicated that we are the Body of Christ. The “distance” of the Divine is the distance to our indwelling Spirit. Jesus is reminding us that the blocks we put up to this intimacy may not be so much an honouring of “sacred” as a reluctance to live our state as intimate relatives of the Divine.
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