Scripture Reflections – Sunday, January 21st, 2012

Is 62: 1 -5; 1Cor 12:4-11; John 2:1-11

2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Isaiah tells us this week that “the LORD delights in you”.   I had a powerful experience of what this means about 10 or 15 years ago when my daughter was a small child.  She was still at an age when it is socially acceptable (more or less) to bring some sort of small and not too messy snack to help keep the peace during the celebration of the Mass.  Our preferred snack of choice was Pepperidge Farm cheese flavored goldfish.

It came time for me to get up to receive communion and my daughter was getting fidgety.  I gave her the bag of goldfish just as the organist and cantor began one of my favorite hymns – I can’t remember the title, but it’s a bilingual story of a fisherman, presumably one of the apostles, leaving boat and nets behind to follow Jesus. (“Lord, when you walked by the seashore….”is how it begins.)  When I came back from receiving the Eucharist, I saw that my daughter had covered the entire area where we were sitting with fish!

Now, I suppose the normal reaction would have been for me to reprimand her and insist that she put the goldfish away.  But I didn’t .  All I could do was smile and resist the urge to laugh out loud.  (I hope I hugged her, but I think I was too self-conscious.)   Yet far more powerful than my own amusement and joy was this profound sense I had of how delighted Jesus was  – with my daughter, with the humor of the situation, and even with me. 

I feel, in those moments when I am most in touch with the better angels of my nature, what a joy and blessed vocation it is for me to be the father of this precious child and her equally precious brother.  Yet when I reflect upon Isaiah’s words and upon this memory, I know that God’s delight in me, and in each and every one of us, is so immensly greater and unadulterated than my own delight in my children.

So….  When was the last time you experienced God’s delight in you?

Jim Philipps (3rd millennium pilgrim)

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