The Lord Delights in You

Douglas McManaman
Homily for the 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
January 16, 2022
Reproduced with Permission

"No more shall people call you 'Forsaken, ' but you shall be called 'My Delight, 'For the LORD delights in you."


There is no doubt that in this reading, the Lord is addressing Israel, who is His bride. However, the deeper and ultimate meaning of these verses is that they address each individual human person, each one created in the image and likeness of God. We know this from the gospels, for Christ healed individual persons. This is what has been so difficult for human beings throughout history to understand. We tend to see ourselves as members of a larger group, and of course we are, but the problem is that the group can and often does overshadow the concrete person; for the person does not exist for the group, rather, the group exists for the person (just as man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man). The group as a whole is not a person, but you are a person. Christ, who is the Second Person of the Trinity of Persons, came to redeem the human person, and if you were the only person who needed to be redeemed, Christ would have come for you and you alone.

On one of my pastoral visits to a local elementary school, a young grade 5 girl said to me that she was told by her parents that, with respect to this pandemic, "God is taking a vacation". Although there is something hopeful in this claim--insofar as vacations come to an end and the vacationer returns and takes care of outstanding business--, it is a rather dangerous claim to make, for God does not leave us alone even for an instant. In fact, you and I have God's undivided attention at every instant of our existence, and children above all need to understand that. It is not possible for a limited human being to give undivided attention to more than one person at the same time, but God can give each individual person His undivided attention simultaneously and perpetually, because God is unlimited.

It is remarkable to consider what it means that we have God's undivided attention at every instant of our existence; for it means He loves each one of us as if there is only one of us, that is, as if you are the only one for Him to love. It is as if everything in the universe was created ultimately for you alone, that all this exists to sustain and serve you, i.e., the environment, the law of gravity and all the other laws of physics, the cycles, and the entire order of nature, etc. In fact, if you or I really knew how much God loves us, we would die of joy. And this life is precisely about learning to be loved like that. This means allowing myself to be loved like that , for you and I tend not to allow that for ourselves because we have a very uncompromising and narrow sense of justice for ourselves and thus don't see ourselves as deserving of that love, so we choose not to open ourselves to it. But His love for us is not a matter of justice--of course, no one deserves to be loved like that--rather, His love is a matter of pure gift.

The Lord delights in you, completely attentive to you at every instant of your existence. He does not delight in you because you are so talented and have achieved so much-that's the love of this world; this world loves you by virtue of your gifts and talents or is indifferent to you by virtue of your lack of them. God, on the other hand, loves you because you are His, you are in His image and likeness; He sees you in Himself, and Himself in you.

It is so important to get a handle on this. It is difficult to do so because the culture in which we live does not see the value of the individual person, or as Berdyaev would have put it, the privileges of the nobility have not been extended to all mankind, which would raise all to the level of nobility, "since human dignity was first recognized for the aristocracy" (See his The Fate of Man in the Modern World ). We continue to think in terms of the group--general democratization rather than general aristocratization--, and we value others on the basis of how useful they are to the group as a whole. We award students for their contribution to the group, for their achievements, which reflect well on the group, the school, the school board, etc., and whose talents promise to serve society well in the future. But in terms of the person himself or herself, we still don't quite get it; for we still have legalized abortion. Medical schools are permeated with a pro-abortion/pro-choice mentality. The developing child in the womb is simply not recognized as "person".

Upon conversion, however, when a person becomes a new creation in Christ, when he is awakened to the knowledge of how much he is loved by God, that God really does pay undivided attention to him at every moment of his existence and is loved as if he or she is the only one that exists, it is then that he or she begins to notice the person, is awakened to the absolute and intrinsic value and dignity of the person--for we only see in others what we see in ourselves. It is at that point that morality suddenly becomes easy. To have a moral discussion with people today can be very difficult; they can become upset rather quickly. It is generally true that morality is painful for most people. But after a true conversion experience, it is no longer painful, and moral science becomes a "no brainer". The problem is there are a lot of people in the Church, who regularly come to Mass, but who still have yet to convert. These are the people who write letters to the bishop when moral matters are preached in a way consistent with the teachings of the Church, but which upsets them nonetheless. Such people want religion without conversion. It's not that they are nasty or horrible people; they just have not been awakened to the "personhood" of others, because they haven't been awakened to their own personhood through an acute awareness of the divine gaze upon them. The purpose of this life is to come to know the delight that the Lord has for you personally and to allow yourself to be moved by that love.

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