Comfortable distance

The texts today from the Roman Catholic Lectionary reveal our tendency to be led away from deep relationship with God through which we live by faith and are directed by the Spirit of God to superficial contact wherein we maintain links to our religion yet are not so engaged that we are likely to forego our point of view and plan for life in pursuit of holiness. The refusal of the Jewish men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, of the third chapter of the Book of Daniel to accept worship of the god of the 7^th century BCE ruler of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, is understood by Friar JudeWinkler to be referring to the oppression of Jerusalem by the Assyrian Emperor, ANTIOCHUS IV, who lived closer to the time of Daniel and who attempted to destroy the national identity of the people conquered by his force. Jesus is shown in the passage from the Gospel of John to be pointing out to the religious authorities that they had moved away from the relationship of faith which their ancestors lived with God. The inability of the leaders to see the relationship of Jesus to God the Father and the life of Jesus as being in the faith tradition of Abraham and Moses is evidence of the loss of depth in their contact with God. The Pharisees point to the kind of religiosity which we fall into where our practices and habits become self satisfying ritual and, as Friar Jude reminds us, we avoid the expressions of our faith which set us aside and identify us as people on the journey to holiness as we seek, through faith the full flowering of our being as transformed into living in and as Christ.