Before the birth of Christ, two events that mark the history of our Faith, are the Exodus and the Babylonian captivity. These two events were part of the life and prayer of Christ himself. The Exodus is the founding story. God breaks into history and rescues the Hebrews and creates from them, in the land of promise, his people, Israel. In the passage of time, what was never expected happened, the Israelites are deported and condemned to a life of slavery in the land of Babylon. But God is ever faithful, he again breaks into history and brings them back to the land of promise. In the person of Jesus, God breaks into history in an ultimate way. He is our founding story and the foundation of the fullness of faith. There is no longer a search for a new Exodus, but what about a return from Babylon?
The connection I’m making is with the pandemic. All of us have distinct memories of “how it used to be”. Taking into account the fact that we have this wonderful ability to deny and imagine the past as better, it is not fantasy too long for a sense of normalcy. We long for the time when we will no longer live in dread of the disease – at home and abroad.
The Babylon captivity can be divided into three stages: Before, during, and after. The writings of the prophets, Isaiah for example, at the first stage, remind the Israelites that God will never abandon them, even though their lack of fidelity created the collapse of their society. In the second stage, when all seems to be lost with defeat and deportation, come to the words of consolation, “those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint”. In the third stage, there is a call to come home, “I rejoiced that they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of Yahweh.”!
My prayer and hope are that we are now in the third stage, God is calling us home. It has been a time of pain, suffering, and death that no one expected. We have become aware of God’s consoling presence in the courage of so many women and men who have placed themselves at risk; in the seƫng aside by so many of individual ideologies to be one in the search for the common good. And, for many of us, we have learned and relearned to pray.
Now, please God, may it be time to come home, into his Reign. Jesus once asked, with what can we compare the Reign of God. Some might have said, with the immensity of towering mountains, the depths of the ocean, the vast expanse of the cosmos. Jesus answered, “with a mustard seed”. In our midst, there be many mustard seeds, breaking through because of every tear that has been shed, and every heart that has been broken.
Another wise man once asked, when will we know that dawn has arrived. When the many could not find the right answer, the wise man smiled and said, when there is sufficient light in the heart to recognize in every person a brother and sister.
Father Francisco Gómez, S.T.