This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.
Can God be kept in a box?
Solomon didn’t think so, as we see in today’s first reading. “Can it indeed be that God dwells on earth? If the heavens and the highest heavens cannot contain you, how much less this temple which I have built!”
Solomon’s humility before God is refreshing in the face of the Pharisees in today’s gospel. Fast-forward a few centuries from Solomon, and the Jewish religious authorities think they’ve managed to box God in thoroughly. They’ve hemmed Him in on every side with their niggling little precepts about cup-polishing and bed-cleansing, about helping a mule on the Sabbath but not a human being. The message is simple: Do all these little things, and you receive a get-out-of-jail free card; you don’t even have to give God a second thought. He’s placated.
And so they acted in their own lives. They roundly disregarded God and neighbor. It is perhaps especially the latter that utterly infuriates Jesus. His compassion for the needs of his fellow humans is His acute focus, and the Pharisees’ tone-setting of blithe disregard stirs His wrath.
But in the end, God can live in a box. Jesus channels His wrath, not in destruction, but in self-sacrifice, so totally encompassing mankind is His loving compassion that He even prays specifically for those killing Him, a group that includes those same Pharisees. And He does so with his some of His last breaths.
He boxes Himself into the temple of human flesh, He boxes Himself into imprisonment, suffering, and death. He suffers every limitation willingly to free us from the stifling box of our own sin, and to free us from every boundary, allowing us to taste infinity.
And ultimately, to this day, He literally boxes Himself into the tabernacle present in every Catholic Church, so that from that vantage point He can accompany us in our challenges and tribulations.
Whom all the world cannot contain, limits Himself that we may find boundlessness.
Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus to take you up into the dynamic, not only of the limitless of His divinity, but then also of His self-sacrifice for His creatures. Ask Him to fill you with the compassion that drove Him to distraction. Ask Him to fill you with His greatness, that you may join Him in self-giving for the needy.
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