Other Face of God

The WORD in other words (2018) by Fr Antonio Pernia SVD – Divine Word Institute of Mission Studies, Tagaytay City

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time – B

The contrast could not have been any clearer. Between Jesus and his disciples. Between God’s ways and worldly ways. Between selfless service and selfish ambition.

The disciples continued to hold on to the customary idea of a God identified with power and might, and of the Messiah who would come as a victorious conqueror. In the light of this, it was quite natural for them to give expression to their personal ambitions and argue about who among them was the greatest.

Jesus, on the other hand, in this second prediction of his passion, tried to show them a different image of God and of the Messiah. A Messiah who would come to save the people not through the way of power and might in victorious majesty but through the path of weakness and suffering in selfless service. And a God who was totally “different” as to upturn the accepted values of the world, a God who was utterly “other” as to upset conventional ways of looking at the world. As the Gospel puts it: “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.”

The passion of Jesus is a revelation of the “other face” of God – not the familiar and customary face of God which makes us complacent and comfortable, but the unfamiliar and mysterious face of God which challenges and disturbs us. Not the familiar face of God as seen from the “overside” of history, that is, from the standpoint of the victors and the powerful, but the unfamiliar face of God as seen from the “underside” of history, that is, from the standpoint of the victims and the marginalized.

It is at the risk of missing God’s truth and of misunderstanding Jesus that we resist or reject the “otherness” of God. It is also at the risk of getting stuck in our old selves that we fail or neglect to see the “other face” of God. For this other face of God summons us to newness, calls us to become more than ourselves, and leads us to a new sense of the nearness of God. As Pope Francis puts it: “We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being” (EG 8).