(Audio)
How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another
and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God?
We care too much what other people think of us and not nearly enough about what the Father thinks about Jesus. We tacitly accept the faith. We search the Scriptures, the Catechism, the writings of the saints, and the documents of the Magisterium in order to find justification for our stagnation.
But you do not want to come to me to have life.
The praise of men has clouded our judgments as to the things that truly matter. We have come to believe that entertainment, health, and feelings of pleasure are what matter most. Religion is relegated to assuaging our guilt that God ought to have some claim on us.
yet if another comes in his own name,
you will accept him.
Even in matters of faith we prefer the big branded programs with famous names attached to more simple offerings. Fortunately, these programs are often good. But they feed our tendency to believe the world about what is important.
For if you had believed Moses,
you would have believed me,
because he wrote about me.
We need to be led to the center. It isn't the peripheries of the new and novel that hold what we really need most. It is the one whom we already know to whom we need to draw closer still. It is the one who is with us always and wants to draw us closer to himself who is our deepest need and desire.
If we, like the people of Israel in Egypt, turn aside to idols because of our lack of satisfaction with God's providence, then let us turn back to the living and true God. Jesus is the new Moses who "[w]ithstood him in the breach to turn back his destructive wrath." He is our advocate before the Father who himself desires all to be saved and come to knowledge of the truth (see First Timothy 2:4). But salvation and idolatry are mutually exclusive. Without holiness no one will see God (see Hebrews 12:14). But God has promised us that Jesus will himself be our righteousness. And his promise is solid.
Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel,
and how you swore to them by your own self, saying,
'I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky;
and all this land that I promised,
I will give your descendants as their perpetual heritage.'"
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