The Holy Otherness of God

Message from Fr. Jose Koluthara, CMI

Lord Jesus, make me a catechist teaching your mercy and generous forgiveness through my life

My Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The readings of this Sunday seems to invite our attention to the importance of catechesis in the church. The U.S. Catholic bishops have designated this third Sunday of September as Catechetical Sunday.

The first reading’s insistence (Is 55:6-9) that God’s ways are not our ways provides a solid basis for the need for catechesis. The Gospel parable (Mt 20:1-16) provides a good example of how different God’s ways are from our instinctive human reactions to a situation. It might be good, therefore, to focus precisely on that disjuncture.

There is a tendency among us humans to bring God “down to our level” by attributing to God some of our baser human attitudes and behaviours. For example, because many of us have a knee-jerk reaction to the wrongs done to us and tend to pay back blow for blow, evil for evil, we may think that God will act with like spitefulness. Similarly, we who tend to hold grudges, dredge up past hurts and relish vengeance. We presume God will not forgive because we cannot or will not; we think God will harbour anger because we do. We think that God would never afford the grace of another chance for conversion, for repentance, for reconciliation because we find such grace “cheap” or “offensive” and thereby stifle its possibilities. We have to be on guard against diminishing the holy otherness of God. This otherness of God is revealed as mercy and generous forgiveness when human standards would dictate otherwise. Here lies the crux of the challenging mission shouldered by catechists.

Do we give special respect and reverence to catechists as those who help the community to embrace values and behaviour that flow from Christ rather than from society? Too often people assume that the function of catechesis is to produce people who will behave according to society’s accepted rules, that is to conform to the status quo.

Yet if God’s ways are not our ways, the fruit of good catechesis will be people who challenge the status quo whenever it is at odds with the values of the Gospel.

Let us specially pray today for all the religious teachers in Catholic Schools and parish religious programmes, preschool catechists and catechumenate team members.