Sunday, February 04, 2007

Christ became ever more and more painfully convinced that
men did not know God. They can't, He said, or they could not
live as they are doing. Some of them are so anxious and
worried, with all God's care and strength and love to lean
against! They cannot know of it, and be so fidgety and nervous
as they are. Some of them are afraid. Their consciences have
drawn so grim a picture of Him that fearfully they shrink out
of His presence, wish there were not God! Frightened of God,
with His free and full and eager forgiveness, with His
incredible generosity, with His compassionate heart that
nobody can sour into illwill, do what he may. And even the
best of them are not quite sure. Their faith at most is but a
timorous hope, and a trembling perhaps; no more. Often in the
Synagogue He had watched them sobbing out their penitential
psalms and begging God to turn from anger and be gracious
toward them... And it amazed Christ. Look at His sun, He
cries, how it streams down in all its midday fullness on the
most unworthy, and at the rain, how it falls healingly upon
the fields of the least grateful, and how He keeps thrusting
His benefits and blessings into the most soiled hands, loading
the most impossible people with His kindnesses. If only I
could make them see God as He really is: if only they could
realize that He is their Father, that what their own child is
to them, that, and far more, each of them is to Him.
... A. J. Gossip (1873-1954), The Galilean Accent [1926]