Our first reading today from the Book of Wisdom gives us as tender a view of God as any that we might find in the New Testament or the writings of any Christian mystic.
you love all things that are, and loathe nothing that you have made;
how could a thing remain, unless you willed it?
O LORD and lover of souls, your imperishable spirit is in all things!
Passages like this can serve as a counterweight to the idea that the God of the Old Testament is harsh or violent or vengeful. The Hebrew understanding of God was much more subtle than that. By the time of the prophets and the Wisdom tradition the revelation of God had reached a point that is hard to distinguish from a Christian perspective. That’s why we make so much use of it, particularly in our Christmas and Easter liturgies.
Revelation is not a simple cumulative process through the history of the Jews with the New Testament then overtaking and replacing the Old. But when we recognize this we are brought quickly to the question “well then what did Jesus add?” This is a question many good Jews have asked. It might seem shocking to a Christian but it is a question well worth asking.
Jesus did not add to our knowledge of God in the sense that he taught things about God that were not already known in the Hebrew tradition. Jesus himself didn’t claim to be telling us anything new or different (see e.g. Mt 5:17). What he did want is for people to appreciate what had already been revealed and to take note of it – in other words to allow it to change them. He summarizes that in today’s Gospel: “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost”.
And this is what was different from what had gone before. What Jesus brings is not a new or different understanding of God, but rather a direct relationship with God, in a form that never existed previously. Moses met God in a burning bush on a mountain, Elijah in a gentle wind that came by the cave where he was hiding, Isaiah in a vision of burning coals brought from the Temple. One of Paul’s most striking descriptions (or explanations) of Jesus is as the “mediator” between God and us.
This is a much more powerful concept than perhaps we give it credit for. It’s not some vague, quasi-legal idea. It’s illustrated perfectly our Gospel story today. Jesus comes to us individually and asks to spend time with us, whether we’re up a tree, or whatever other foolish position we may have gotten ourselves into.
Only in Jesus did God make himself another human being who could reach out to us.
And that is how God continues to reach out to us. Not through the hands of Jesus reaching up into our trees, but through the hands of Christian brothers and sisters. Because Jesus became one with us, we are now that human presence of God in the world.
We need to take very literally the words of Teresa of Avila:
“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”
Christ was the first-born from the dead. We are those born later, having died with him. We now bring God to any wealthy tax collectors we might find up a tree, and hopefully to many others.