Who do we think we are?

In last week’s article, we spoke about an aspect of ‘who we think we are’ as our being the People of God.  What does it mean to be the People of God?

In the background of the Scriptures, there is always the thought of idolatry.  Every people surrounding the people of the Old Testament had their own gods, so there were those who belonged to the god Moloch just as the Greeks belonged to Zeus and the Romans to Jupiter and the rest of their respective gods.

Israel belonged to this strange God who would not let them make statues of himself, who had the strange name of Yahweh which means ‘I am who I am’ or ‘I will be who I will be’. Names which say something and nothing at the same time. Israel’s God was different, and through the prophets in particular, he kept insisting that he was different.

Among the other peoples, this was hard to get across and was even regarded as ridiculous! It is as if God could not make himself heard among human beings, and so we find that there were chosen ones through whom he set about purifying and developing the understanding of who he was. This long-term development is reflected in the ups and downs of Israel’s history, in the prophetic figures of the Old Testament, and in the psalms. And there is the constant expectation running through the Old Testament that there is someone who is to come in the future.

The expected figure – the Messiah – came in the person of Jesus. One of the constant points which keeps emerging in the life of Jesus is that God is different and this is epitomized in Jesus himself. If we go through the gospels and the other writings of the New Testament, we will find that Jesus was not what people expected. Look at all the controversies and conflicts which fill the pages of those writings. Ultimately Jesus is presenting God in ways that people were not expecting and found unacceptable. And the ultimate moment of this is in the recognition that in this Jesus, we discover God. How could God be identified in a human being?  This is still something that people find hard to accept. Because they think that God could not possibly be found in a human being. 

We are the People of Christ. We must hold this treasure in faith for all humankind, it is entrusted to us to keep alive in the history of our human world. He is the key to unlocking the meaning of that human history.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin

Published: 9 August 2024