Totally Dependent

Homily for Saturday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

As I pondered the words of this morning’s first reading, my mind was immediately drawn back to the creation stories that we read in the Book of Genesis. Once again, we are told that we were created in the image and likeness of God. However, Jesus Ben Sira goes just a little bit further in describing the gifts that God gave us when we were created. God has limited our days, given us strength, helped us to know fear of the Lord, gave us inventive minds, and filled us with the discipline of understanding. This description of human beings certainly tells us that God never intended for us to be easily misled or tempted by evil.

If we read today’s Gospel text in the light of what we hear from the Hebrew Scriptures today, the notion of approaching God’s kingdom like little children takes on a completely different hue. Infants or preschoolers literally depend upon their parents for everything. Without their parents, they would have never learned the difference between right and wrong, between danger and safety, or how to be confident rather than afraid. Just as children must depend upon their parents for everything in their lives, God’s desire is for us to be dependent, totally dependent upon God. That is where some of us go wrong. We tend to forget this kind of dependence as adults.

Jesus uses little children in the Gospel as an example of how we are to approach our lives with God. If nothing else, this reading from the Hebrew Scriptures should give us a completely different idea of the virtue of humility. God dispenses all good things and bestows them upon us. Nothing that is good comes of our own strength or power. Dependence upon God is essential if we wish to be holy people.