AMONG YOU, UNKNOWN TO YOU

 

AMONG YOU, UNKNOWN TO YOU

The story is told by Indian wise man, Anthony de Melo. about a religious community that was disintegrating. They were aging and bickering and had lost direction. The leader of the group decided to consult a holy man and ask his advice. He simply said, ‘Do you not know the Messiah is among you?’ The leader was puzzled and went back to the community and reported the holy man’s words.

They did not understand but they began to look at one another and say, ‘Could this one be the Messiah? Or that one? Or even that one?’ They began to see each other differently and began to respect each other, a respect that gradually grew into a warmth. Soon the community turned a corner and became wholesome again and attracted others to join them.

We have no idea who this person is we meet today. When I was at our Social Development Centre in Chishawasha, we use to have members of the boards of organisations we dealt with coming to see what we were doing. I well remember the time Robert MacNamara was one such. I was in awe of the man who had been President John F. Kennedy’s Defence Secretary at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. For about a week the world was on the edge of a nuclear war that might have destroyed us all. And here he was calmly bumping along a Mhondoro dirt road looking at our projects.  I was the only one on the bus who knew who he was. I was totally in awe of the man and could hardly put a few sentences together in talking to him. 

In this first week of February we definitively end the Christmas season which has lasted forty days, as Lent and Easter will shortly do. The occasion is the ‘presentation’ of the baby Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem. No one, in that milling crowd, knew who this child was – except two old representatives of the ‘remnant’ of Israel, Simeon and Anna. The promises to Abraham, the covenant on Sinai and the words of the prophets are being fulfilled but no one notices.

Our world may look predictable and – for many of us – our lives secure. But we live in a charged world where those we meet – from the greatest to the least – may be about to change everything. John the Baptist told the pharisees ‘standing among you, unknown to you, is the one ... and I am not fit to undo the strap of his sandals’. Whoever and whatever we meet on our way, we are invited to stop and pay attention. Otherwise we may miss something that may change our life and that of those among whom we live.

9 February 2025    Sunday 5 C           Is 6:1...8      1 Cor 15:1-11       Lk 5:1-11