It is remarkable to see how little we change from one generation to the next. The message Moses gives (Deuteronomy 6: 4-13) could as easily have been written today, as we live and move, seemingly without stopping, so much of the time. The message is so practical and down-to-earth. When the Lord delivers the people to the promised land, where everything is already built for them and in good shape, He tells them not to forget the Lord, nor to forget from where they have come.
Recently I watched a streamed lecture, The African Role—Contributions to Early Christianity and the Early Church, featuring Dr. Miangulizi Sanyika. He had the same message. It is human nature to forget our past when life gets easier. That is why we must remind each generation of the tough times, and of how far we can move from our Creator’s Will if we forget to include him in our daily lives, to live in Christ.
Then today’s Gospel (Matthew 17:14-20) shows the human nature of Jesus, an aspect that is often challenging for us to accept. Jesus demonstrates the most human of traits, a lack of patience. The disciples attempted to cure a boy but failed. In modern parlance we’d say that the boy’s father “lost patience” and went “over their heads”. He took the boy directly to the boss, to Jesus. Jesus then expresses impatience with the earthly world, even going so far as to wonder how long he must “endure” it. When the disciples ask him what went wrong when they tried to cure the boy, he says with painful bluntness that they lacked the faith to cure the child.
This rebuff reminds us of many parent-child interactions. How often do we look back, with the benefit of hindsight, and wish that we had shown a little more patience, letting the child work through the problem himself and then tried to teach the lesson a little more gently.
But, of course, Jesus was human as well as divine. When I was a child, I used to think of Jesus as being “perfect” in a human way. He must’ve been the smartest boy in his Hebrew class, the best at playing tennis (my sport) and so on. But that childish view of him misses the most important aspect of him. He really was human and had to suffer with many of the same things that we do. He got hungry and thirsty, caught colds, lost his patience, and occasionally got angry.
One of the anchors of my faith as an adult has always been that for him to have been truly divine, he had to triumph over his human death. Some skeptics might say that Jesus’ resurrection was only a “resurrection” in the sense that some truly remarkable human beings – say, Archbishop Joseph Henry Ganda, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, or Mother Teresa – continue to “be” with us through their works even after their death. Deep in my heart I know that what happens on that cross is far more powerful than that. It involves a real and true resurrection and not simply a powerful memory that continues in the minds of his friends. That is what Moses is cautioning us. God gives us “great and prosperous cities not of our building, houses full of good things not furnished by [us], wells [we] did not dig, vineyards and olives [we] did not plant. When you have eaten these and had your fill, then take care you do not forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You must fear the Lord your God, you must serve Him, by His name you must swear.” (Deuteronomy 6: 10-14)
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!