Day: September 19, 2021

“God hath visited his people.”

It is an intriguing phrase. The Greek verb translated here as visited also means to look upon or to watch over in the sense of having oversight from which derives the idea of bishops. Here it is about God’s oversight of our humanity.

Today’s readings offer an interesting sense of the dynamic interplay between abiding and visiting that belongs to a larger Scriptural and cultural understanding about the nature of our humanity. Paul prays that “Christ may dwell in [our] hearts by faith”, that we may be “rooted and grounded in love”; in short, in that which abides. In the Gospel Christ comes near the little city of Nain, visiting it, as it were, and yet something abides in and through that encounter. Both readings invite us to consider the nature of lives with one another and with God.

Is God simply a visitor? One who comes and goes, here today and gone tomorrow? A welcoming presence or something more disturbing? Ishtar, the ancient Sumerian goddess of love and war (an interesting combination!), wants Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk, to be her boy-toy, her lover. But intimacy with the gods is not always a good thing. Gilgamesh rejects her advances because he knows that she turns all of her lovers into animals. In other words, you lose your humanity! Encounters between humans and the divine can be terrifying. “Our God is a consuming fire,” as Hebrews reminds us, recalling the sense of distance between God and man. “No one can see God and live,” as Exodus puts it.

Owing to the pandemic, there has been considerably less visiting among friends and family. Social distancing is the mantra for our isolation and separation from one another, tainting the forms of public interaction with fear and suspicion, with anxiety and even animosity. Perhaps, though, this may ultimately help us to reclaim the primacy of our lives as essentially social creatures in our care and concern for each other rather than radically autonomous beings whose relation to each other is merely instrumental, using each other for our own ends, trapped in the illusions of our self-completeness. This Sunday speaks to these deeper truths.

Visitors come and go. Yet, in the momentary intersection of their lives and ours, there is an abiding truth. There is the recognition of the common bond of our humanity. There is the opening out of our souls to each other, a sharing of our lives however fleeting, however brief. Visitors come and go but we, too, are visitors.

This leads to the ancient insight about hospitality as a moral obligation. The stranger, the foreigner, the alien is to be welcomed into our midst and treated with courtesy and grace. The sojourner, the visitor, is the one who has come near to us. He is, in fact, our neighbour. The stranger is owed what we owe our neighbour. The Old Testament makes this abundantly clear. “When a stranger sojourns with you in the land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself;  for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God,” as Leviticus states (Lev. 19.33,34). And it is further emphasized in the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament.

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