Where Are You?
Fr. Michiel Peeters — Let’s imagine the scene. Jesus is in his birthplace. A crowd has gathered to listen to him. There are also some scribes from Jerusalem, who are there to keep an eye on that rabbi who attracts so many people; and if possible, to catch him in a mistake, an untruth, something by which they can keep people away from him. Some of Jesus’ relatives approach. They find it absurd that their cousin draws such crowds. They want to take him with them, for He must be “out of his mind.”
When the scribes hear that, they have the cue they were looking for! His own family says he’s crazy. Everybody go home. Yes, but — you can hear people thinking — how can someone who is out of his mind say such things, do such things as Jesus does? The scribes offered an explanation. “He has an unclean spirit”; “he is possessed by Beelzebul, … by the prince of demons he drives out demons.” Jesus makes short work of that reasoning: “Why would Satan drive out Satan?” What the scribes are doing — calling God’s work, the work of the devil — is grave. Man’s heart is perfectly capable of recognizing God’s work as such. Labeling God’s work as the opposite of what it is, as evil, Jesus calls sinning against the Holy Spirit, which is unforgivable if it persists.
Some bystanders insist: “Your mother and … brothers and … sisters are outside asking for you,” implying that he should leave with them. But in response, Jesus looks around, at the people who are attentively watching and listening to him. Then he says: “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
What does “doing the will of God” mean, an attitude he apparently discerns in those persons sitting in a circle around him?
Here, the first reading, from the first pages of the Bible, helps us.
Already at the beginning of human history, man turns away from God. But from that very beginning God goes looking for him: “After the man, Adam, had eaten of the tree, the Lord God called to the man and asked him, ‘Where are you?’”
Adam then does ’t simply say, “Here I am, Lord,” but hides himself among the trees, and among his reasonings and justifications: “I was afraid because I was naked…. The woman whom you put here with me—she gave me the fruit….” God looks for us, whatever we’ve done, wherever we hide, and calls us by our name: “Adam, where are you?”
How? Through all circumstances.
Through everything we run into, that stirs our heart, wakes us up. “Adam, where are you?” One who does the will of God is one who, when God calls him, “Adam, where are you?”, simply answers, “I am here,” without hiding, without justifications. The justification will come from God.
What’s asked of man is to answer God’s call, whenever we hear it. This was the attitude Jesus saw in the simple people sitting there around him: they recognized the exceptional, the divine, in what Jesus said and did, and they responded to that call, with their attentive presence. What one can become who responds to God’s call, like Paul, we heard in the second reading.
Because of what he had experienced with Christ, he could say to the Corinthians: “Everything … is for you…. Although our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. … This momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison…. If our earthly dwelling, a tent, should be destroyed, we have a building from God, a dwelling not made with hands, eternal in heaven.” Such hope, such certainty in the future is possible for those who do the will of God, that is, who respond with simplicity to God calling them through the circumstances: “Where are you?”
By the homily of Father Michiel Peeters on June 9, 2024, the 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B.
Unrevised notes and translation by the author.
