Knowing Our Place

The texts in the Roman Catholic Lectionary today point to one of the tensions in the pursuit of the journey to intimacy with the Divine. Paul reassures us that we have the inheritance of kinship with Jesus and the life with the Holy Spirit becoming living praise to God. At the same time as the psalmist tells us of the love of God for the righteous and just and that evidence of the love of God is everywhere in the world, the writer reminds us of the distance between heaven and humanity. The Gospel of Luke contains warnings against hypocrisy. The righteousness we may flaunt through practice of piety needs to be based in the knowledge that even though “all have sinned” and “all have fallen short”, God is faithful to the relationship and Jesus exhorts us to fearlessness in the living of our relationship to the Divine.