Co-labor with God

15th Sunday in Ordinary Time—A

Unlike human speech, God means what God says every time. In Hebrew, God’s word is dabar, a “word event.” God’s word happens and matters. More than that, in Christ, God’s Word becomes matter, a visible action incarnated into human lives and human history.

Yet God’s word is not magic; it is no divine “abracadabra.” God’s word is a seed patiently waiting for the ground of our heart to act: to loosen, open, receive, and change. God’s active word collaborates—co-labors—with our visible response, just as sower and soil make space for one other and mother and child groan together in labor.

This should make us wary whenever we speak in God’s name or make any prayer “through Christ our lord.” Are we ready to co-labor with God to make the words we speak in Christ’s name a visible action in our world? Will we move beyond just “thoughts and prayers” and become the fertile and fruitful soil that manifests God’s action?

Or shall we fulfill Isaiah’s prophetic warning: “They look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand. … Gross is the heart of this people, they will hardly hear with their ears, they have closed their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and be converted, and I heal them” (Mt 13:14–15).

This post was first published in “GIA Quarterly: A Liturgical Music Journal.”

Image credit: Photo by Esteban Castle on Unsplash.