Posts Tagged ‘Deuteronomy 10:17-21’
To Be Perfect As He Is Perfect – Br. Sean Glenn
Deuteronomy 10:17-21
Matthew 5:43-48
Today, Jesus speaks to us, not as a people, a nation, a church, or as an internationally defined global community. Rather, He speaks to us as He always has: as creatures of His hand and people of His pasture. There is no room in this claim on us for the passing boundaries of earthly empires or the othering practices of an assumed cultural superiority. No one person and no one group are the center of the universe Jesus reveals to us, for we are each and all the center of the Divine attention, an attention that knows, searches, and sees all—for it is the attention of the Eternal One, the source and center of all reality.
The Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, … who is not partial and takes no bribe. You shall fear the Lord your God; him alone you shall worship; to him you shall hold fast, and by his name you shall swear. [1]
No creaturely title or pedigree, no national border or communal parameter undoes our dependence on this God for all good things. We are all, from birth to death, waking to sleeping, dependent moment to moment for our life and our pasture—our sustenance and security. They are not realities of our own making. Our sustenance and security can only ever be gifts of the Love that created us. No border can free or save us from the claims of such a dependence. It usurps every one of our identity claims.
Yet today, Jesus also speaks to us as bordered and boundaried people. As people who live in carefully marked communities, and who harbor a dangerously guarded dependence on national, political, religious, and ideological borders.