for September 10
Thursday of the Twenty-Third Week of Ordinary Time

“If one loves God, one is known by him,” says St. Paul. You don’t need to be a scripture scholar to know that ‘knowing’ in the biblical sense is not the same as saying, “I know where to get the best cheesesteaks in Philadelphia,” or “I know a foolproof recipe for mac and cheese,” or even “he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.” It’s more like, “I’d know my way home blindfolded,” a knowledge that’s steady, reliable, somehow a part of our very selves.

For a while during my college years, I was very fond of Psalm 139, from which today’s responsorial psalm is drawn. The university parish folk group (as it was known back in the day) had recently discovered the music of the Saint Louis Jesuits, and Dan Schutte’s setting of Psalm 139 , “You are Near,” was in heavy rotation at campus ministry Masses. That melody will always be in the background when I hear this psalm.

Perhaps I loved them—both psalm and song—because at twenty, I was still pretty much a mystery to myself. There are times in our lives when we want our ways to be so familiar and to be so closely guided in ways everlasting. There are also times when we are not in such a hurry to subject our journeys and rest to such scrutiny. With age and experience comes the knowledge of  how distant we might be from how we’d want to be known; of how we’d measure up against the standards of, say, Luke’s sermon on the plain in today’s gospel. We may even question the measures we are to be measured by: Do good to those who hate me? Given to everyone who asks, lend and expect nothing back? Sounds like a call to be a pious doormat. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and gifts will be given to you. No, thank you; sounds like a pretty stingy spiritual life.

But this passage from Luke’s gospel also calls us to “be merciful, just as also your father is merciful.” There’s a certain mercy in that phrasing itself, for in Matthew’s gospel, the same teaching is rendered, “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Mercy, today’s gospel insists, is the measure that we have received, the measure by which all else is measured. We can rely on the steady mercy of the One to whom all our ways are familiar, as well known as we know our way home. All that we are asked is to allow such mercy to become somehow a part of our very selves—even beginning, perhaps, with being merciful to ourselves.
—BJ Brown

Today’s readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website.

Follow this link to the ocp.org official lyric video of You Are Near: https://youtu.be/kVl4nrfSQ-w.