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Taking Risks By Kathy Goetz OP ~ July 21, 2008 |
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Micah 6:1-4, 6-8 All of us are involved in risks, which are essential ingredients for normal happiness and greatness. Spouses and families take risks for “better or worse, till death do us part.” Students take risks as they choose their majors and decide on life professions. We took the risk of making a lifelong commitment to religious life. We continue to take the risk of becoming one new entity from seven Dominican congregations. Our long salvation history of faith and hope in God’s promises reveal God’s love and care in every era. The Jewish people were given what they needed day by day as they experienced the exodus. But sometimes they complained, they were disappointed at what God’s was doing and how God took care of them and were not faithful to God. On the other hand, God’s faith in his people Israel also proved disappointing. For this reason, he pleads with them through the prophet Micah: “O my people, what have I done to you, Or how have I wearied you? Answer me! For I brought you up from the land of Egypt… As we know these are the “Reproaches” of the Good Friday liturgy. After the unveiling of the cross, we sing. “My people what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me! For forty years I led you safely through the desert. I fed you with manna from heaven… But you led your Savior to the cross And gave me vinegar to drink.” Micah also advises us on the answer. He states what God does not want—many holocausts, thousands of lambs, stream of oil. What God wants most is the interior attitude of the soul. Micah then wrote the well-known lines: “You have been told, O man and woman, what is good, And what the Lord requires of you: Only to do the right And to love goodness And to walk humbly with your God.” Or the translation we are more familiar with, “This is what Yahweh asks of you: Only this-- to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God.” The attitude of the soul is what matters. Needing a sign, or God working a miracle for us to have belief, is not in the forefront of the humble person, whose focus, whose single hearted goal is that justice be done in the world, all people are treated with love and respect, and God is the center of their lives. Jesus gives the memorial sign of Jonah—helps them remember his risk of being three days and three nights in the belly of the whale. Carrol Stuhlmueller says so succinctly, “We to too must risk going the depth and letting ourselves be swallowed by God’s will and taken in God’s unknown direction, as happened to Jonah. Then we will experience the sweet happiness of faith’s reward, the delight at the end of long fidelity.” |