THE LOVE THAT FINDS US

Tuesday in the 2nd Week of Advent
Mt 18:12-14

I said it several times in my reflections and homilies, and I run the risk of sounding like a broken record by now, but it is true: We lose only people we love! People we do not love we do not even notice their absence. It is love that makes the difference.

God loses us not because He abandons us, not because He is careless with us, not because He does not care about us. On the contrary, God loses us because He loves us so much and values us infinitely. But if God is powerful, how does and how can He lose us?

God loses us when we choose sin over holiness, when we favor evil over Him who is all good and deserving of all our love. God loses us not because He departs from us. He loses us, instead, because we decide to wander far away from Him. It is never God’s fault when He loses us. It is always ours.

However, always God takes the first initiative to find us. From the very beginning, God has always been searching for us. The very first question recorded in the Bible is a question from God who seeks us out. In Gen 3:9, the primal question was thrown: “Where are you?” It was God’s question to Adam. In the fullness of time, God was no longer contended with throwing questions to man, He rather sent His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to become man Himself. Though sinless, Jesus appeared in our fallen nature. He came to share in our humanity so that we may come to share in His divinity. His incarnation is God’s most dramatic, decisive, and definitive move in seeking us out. In Jesus, the Father has found us.

The birth of Jesus is God becoming part of our human history. He decided to search for us right where we are, in our own cultural, social, and historical milieu. He chose to find us right who, not only where, we are, in our very humanity. The power of God’s love for us is incomprehensibly intense that, as it were, it burst into flesh and became part of the flesh that constitutes our personal and communal history. St. Augustine wrote, “Since God became human, we can be sure that in everything human we can find something of the divine.”

Now that God has found us, we have to do two things. First, we should never leave Him. Second, we must help Him find the others. While remaining in Him, we labor with Him to incarnate Jesus in the lives of every person we meet. But we cannot accomplish these, unless we have a love like His.

Advent is a special season to conceive, nurture, and deliver that love to the world. Let our hearts not be barren; conceive this love. Let our hearts not be dry; nurture this love. Let our hearts not die; deliver this love to the waiting world. May God, who opens wombs of the barren and the virgin, penetrate the hearts of even those who refuse to either hear or answer His primeval question: “Where are you?”