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Second Sunday after the Epiphany Year A

  • Isaiah 49: 1-7

“My cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God… the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, has chosen you.”  Who are the identities of these pronouns– “my” and “you?”  Are they Israel as God’s people; or the prophet, Isaiah; a future anointed one; or any faithful person?  Biblical texts  defy simplistic readings.  They can confuse, frustrate and even seem intentionally ambiguous, but they always instigate interpretation.  Perhaps this passage from Isaiah is providing a summons that can be relevant in many situations, past, present and future.  Perhaps this saying is relevant to any individual or group who seeks to know God and to follow God’s ways with commitment.

  • Psalm 40: 1-12

The psalmist is offering personal testimony to a relationship with the Lord our God.  God’s teachings are buried deeply in him, as the text of his autobiography.  The Lord has given him a “new song.”

  • I Corinthians 1: 1-9

In his salutation to the community of believers in Corinth, Paul reminds the recipients of his letter that:  “God is faithful; by him you were called….”

  • John 1: 29-42

As usual, John’s text differs from the synoptic gospels in noteworthy ways.  He emphasizes John the Baptizer’s testimony about Jesus, not the ritual of baptism itself.  He lists Andrew, one of the Baptizer’s own disciples, as the first to follow Jesus.  It is Andrew who recruits his brother, Peter, to follow.  John’s gospel emphasizes that Andrew, whose seeking after God under the mentorship of the Baptizer, led him to be there that fateful day when Jesus was baptized and Andrew became a follower.  Then, a brother brings along his brother.  Seeking and relationships can bring us near God’s anointed Ones.

John’s version of the baptism of Jesus implies that it was because Andrew was already a seeker that he was present on that important occasion (it was not just blind fate),  when he responded to Jesus; and the text makes it quite clear that it was one brother who brought along another brother, (who turns out to become eventually the leader among the followers of Jesus).  It gets very confusing as to who is seeking whom.  Does our seeking put us closer to God?  Or, does our seeking allow us to discover that we were already being sought out by God?  Whichever, it seems the first and crucial step is each person’s seeking.

In the Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, John Caputo gets at the heart of Derrida’s “deconstruction project” this way:

“To prepare oneself for this coming (venue) of the other is what can be called deconstruction.”  “Derrida is dreaming of what is not and never will be present, what is structurally to come (a-venir).  He is dreaming and praying over an ‘absolute’ future, a future sheltered by an absolute secret and absolved by whatever is presentable, programmable, or foreseeable.”  “Dreaming and desiring, praying and weeping, on the other hand, are a passion for the beyond, (au-dela, the tout autre, the impossible, the unimaginable, un-foreseeable, un-believable, ab-soult surprise, which is absolved from the same).” (p. 73)

At the conclusion of his study, Caputo reveals:

“I have all along been trying to cross the wires of deconstruction with the prophetic tradition….”  “The lines of alliance are traced outside the space of cognition.  For Derrida as for the prophets, what is at issue is not a cognitive delineation of some explanatory principle like a cause prima, not some being or essence marked off by certain predicative traits, but something, I know not what, that emerges in our prayers and tears, that evokes our prayers and our tears, that seeks us out before we seek it, before we know its name, and disturbs and transforms our lives. (emphasis added).(p, 337)

This quest is our salvation.   It is the quest itself that puts us in proximity to God and God’s anointed ones.  And then we wonder: who sought whom first, we after God or God after us?

 

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