I've said it over and over again, but it is just over and over again true that the New Testament is something that helps us better when we can see how it was foreshadowed in the Old Testament. And today's gospel is one tremendously rich example of that. John the Baptist leaps in the presence of Jesus, the unborn child in Mary's womb.
Now, how does this have anything to do with the Old Testament? King David. David was not, did not make the kind of first impression, I suspect, that King Saul's daughter thought he should by dancing naked in front of the Ark of the Covenant. He was so overwhelmed and overtaken by the joy of God and all that God had accomplished and done for him.
What do we have today? John the Baptist leaping for joy in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant. Mary. So much of our spiritual life is successful to the degree that we can recognize that we really live in a spiritual world.
Yes, there are ordinary, everyday material things. We're human beings. We're made of material. So, of course, there are all kinds of things that are important related to who we are and how we were made. But our eternal destiny is something far more important.
Sometimes, I think the temptation is to seek to start first with ourselves and then to understand God. But the reality is it's always the other way around. We seek to understand God and then find how it is that the presence of God, the action of God, the love of God, the commands of God, the spiritual life, we then see how those are made visible in our ordinary lives.
The first reading is like that too. It had some difficulty getting into Hebrew Scriptures, I'm told, because it's a very earthy kind of reading. It describes a wild love affair. But why did it make it? Not because it describes in an earthy way a wild love affair that only refers to something in this life, but far more important because it describes to us the relationship that God has with us.
God is the one who leaps like a stag, a gazelle, so excited, so eager to reveal Himself to us, so happy and so desirous to have this relationship with us. It also lets us know what it's like between God and God's people. Also this powerful relationship, it reminds us that God always is the one who initiates and we respond.
God is the one who comes into our life and we then in turn respond to the love that God gives to us. And of course we are on the precipice of Christmas, the great event of the incarnation of our God into our midst.
It is not just that symbolically God is eager to come to us, but far more important in the incarnation itself we see concretely how it is that God is eager to save us, what it is that Jesus longs to do for us, how it is that Jesus takes on our sinfulness so that we can experience the new life of God. Let us pray today that we might be as excited to meet God as He is to meet us.
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