Friday Week 29 OT VC Homecoming October 25, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
“Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.” Is it, though? We all just said that 4 times in a row, but do we really mean it? Do we really understand what it means to “long” to see His face? This isn’t some idle wish, some passive desire. And seeing the face of God isn’t as easy as facetiming a friend. There’s a depth, a labor, a concerted effort here that most people fail to appreciate.
Let me put it another way. Have you ever tried to climb a mountain? I have, about 20 years ago in Cimarron, New Mexico. There’s a mountain called the “Tooth of Time.” We didn’t just climb it, we climbed it so that we could see the sunrise. You think getting to school or Church for 7:30 is early? Try getting to the top of a mountain before the sun even rises. Some of the hunters and fisherman understand what it’s like to get up stupid early so you can be where you need to be when you need to be there. It’s not something you just kind of let happen. You have to want it, plan for it, and do the work.
Why, though? Why lose that sleep, make that effort? Why scramble up the broken, crumbling side of a mountain in the dark? To see. To see something you can never capture on film or phone or create with AI. I was excited to climb… at first. You guys know that excitement when you first decide to do something difficult. About halfway up, though, I started to get annoyed. All I could see was these large slabs of broken stone, rubble, and crags and the occasional tough, gnarled plant in the gradually increasing light of dawn. That is, until about 2/3 of the way up, someone told me to turn around.
“It’s like heaven,” they said. Indeed. 20 years later, I can still see it when I close my eyes: the rolling ocean of clouds, slightly indented by mountains in the distance, the reddish gold of the hidden sun coloring it all like a divine fire, the whispering silence of the morning filling my ears and heart… nothing has compared. Nothing, that is, except God… whom I don’t yet see with my eyes.
“This is the people that longs to see your face.” I fear, my beloved children, that you don’t yet appreciate what it means to see the face of God. It’s not looking at the face of an old white man with a big beard. To see the face of God is to see beauty itself. Take that mountain-top sunrise, take that moment of witnessing the game-winning touchdown pass, take the eyes of a man or woman to whom you say “I love you” for the first time and they say it back, take the most beautiful, most truthful, the greatest good you’ve ever seen, heard, felt, or sensed… and press into it. Elevate it, multiply it… that is the face of God. Or rather, all the greatest things of this earth are pale shadows of the reflection of his face “The LORD’s are the earth and its fullness.” Heaven is not earthly fun+, it is the face of God – hidden behind so many good things – finally revealed fully and directly, so completely satisfying that you’ll completely forget what it meant to ever be bored or alone or listless. It is finally coming home and finding it full of all you ever wanted.
So I ask you again, do you really long to see his face? Then act like it! And if you don’t – and let’s be honest, many of us don’t really– even if you don’t yet long for it, start trying until the longing grows!
How, though? How do I long to see his face? What do I actually do to get to see it? St. Paul tells “live in a manner worthy of the call you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love.” Humility, peace, gentleness, love. We’re going to completely blow out the Vikings in football tonight, I think. Great. But they are Opelousas Catholic, after all. So, even while we’re in the middle of proving we’re the better team, let us prove even more that we are their brothers and sisters in Christ. Before, during, and after, let us love them, and our neighbors, and even our enemies.
And hear the advice Jesus himself gives. We care very much about the weather around here. We long to keep our lives and our property intact, so we not only look at clouds, we build billion-dollar infrastructures to track hurricanes and any other weather that threatens those things we love. Jesus isn’t saying it’s wrong to predict the weather, he’s just saying aim higher!
We could say we long for victory in football, success in our academics and career, the girl or boy we like to say “yes” when we ask them to the homecoming dance. So we watch films and practice, we study and develop our skills, we get to know what our crush likes and dislikes. We put in the effort to pursue what we long.
Our psalm tells us to long for God’s face and then asks: “Who can ascend the mountain of the LORD? or who may stand in his holy place?’ He whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain.” These things: sports, grades, careers, relationships… they don’t have to be vain. They often are vain, but if we learn to see the “God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” in and through these things, they don’t have to be.
Finally, there is the sin… the fact is that we need to be “sinless” to climb that mountain. Like waking up early, like the physical training needed to scale a mountain in the dark, climbing the mountain of the Lord to see his face requires some preparation. After rebuking his people for not aiming high enough, for not longing for God’s face as much as they long for good weather, Jesus only gives one piece of advice: “settle the matter on the way.”
You and I will face judgment. We are not sinless. We hurt each other, we offend God. God is the magistrate who will judge us, but the good news is that we have the chance to “settle the matter on the way.” How? By forgiving and asking for forgiveness with each other, not just God. There is no other way.
Do you long to see His face? The face of God, the source of all goodness, truth, beauty, and love? Then start acting like. Start with the people whose faces you see every day – from your best friend to your greatest enemy – because if you can’t love and forgive the people made in His image and likeness, if you can’t look at their face with love, you’ll never see His face either. And that is a sentence worse than any prison. So start longing, start loving, and get to climbing!