‘Crises are not to be feared. It is through repeated crises that God drew closer to His people. Israel’s worst crisis was the destruction of the Temple and the monarchy, and exile to Babylon . . . Israel lost everything that gave her identity : her worship, her nationhood. Then she discovered God closer to her than ever before. God was present in the law, in their mouths and hearts, wherever they were, however far from Jerusalem. They lost God only to receive Him more closely than they could have imagined.
Then that difficult cross-grained man, Jesus, turned up, breaking the beloved law, eating on the Sabbath, touching the unclean, hanging out with prostitutes. He seemed to smash all that they loved, the very way that God was present in their lives. But that was only because God wished to be present even more intimately, as one of us, with a human face. And at every Eucharist, we remember how we had to lose Him on the Cross, but again only to receive Him more closely, not as a Man among us but as our very Life.’
fr Timothy Radcliffe, OP
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