Lv 19:1-3, 11-18 - Knowledge of the Lord comes from the law
Mt 25: 31-46 - Knowledge of the Lord comes from serving the poor
How well do we know God? Our understanding of who God is begins when we reach the age of reason. For most people that’s about seven or eight years old. If we went to Catholic grade school, or CCD, we were given images of God that have, perhaps, remained unchanged throughout our lives.
One such image is the God we see in Leviticus, a word that means “law.” “You shall not curse the deaf, or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but you shall fear your God. I am the lord.” If our image of God is the giver of the law, and the one who judges us, we are right, and it is important for us to be obedient to the law, like little children are obedient to their parents and teachers. Throughout our lives we fear God, hopefully in a reverent way. However, even reverential fear can be, at best, a weak motivation for remaining faithful to this legalistic image of God.
Another image of God comes from the Gospel. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, presents himself as one who is poor, one who is lowly, one who suffers from starvation and thirst, homelessness and nakedness, sickness and imprisonment; he is a stranger and like little children we tend to be afraid of strangers, we shy away from them, we protect ourselves from them.
We cling to comfortable, familiar images of God expecting, perhaps, that when the day of judgment comes we will recognize our Creator. It is when we are able to outgrow our childhood images, though, the familiar, the comfortable, and easy images we have of God, that his face becomes more apparent in this life now.
No matter what images we cling to God wants us to know and love him. So we must see God with the eyes of our hearts.
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