Shekinah

Sunday 25 July 2010
LUKE 11:1-13
SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
LUKE'S GOSPEL SIMPLY SAYS “FATHER” (LK 11:2)

The Disciples asked ‘Lord teach us to pray’ and he says, ‘Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. …’

Luke is today’ Gospel, at other times it is Matthew, as it is called ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ – as it fits with ‘The Lord’s Day’, our Sabbath.

The great Jesuit scholar said, “At Mass, all prayer is addressed to the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit, that is it is always the Father who appears to us as the source of every gift: “Every good endowment and every perfect gift from above, coming down from the Father of lights…” (Jas 1:17). In his presence we feel our unworthiness, but also the permanent possibility that we shall be heaped with good things.

In the days this week that great Hebrew name came to mind, SHEKINAK, Shekinah Glory. It is all about the presence of God. The Israelites departed from Egypt and guarded and guided by the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire of the Presence.

In our own austere chapel we have our Shekinah. When we visit the Blessed Sacrament in the dawn or the dusk the light plays above the tabernacle.

The history of Salvation fills the history of the Presence.

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Homily:

OUR FATHER

The words of the Our Father are among the most precious of the legacies left to us by Jesus before he returned to his Father in Heaven. The words of the Our Father encapsulate so much of our relationship with God. However, the petitions of this sacred prayer are as remarkable for what they don't say as for what they do say. They are as remarkable for their omissions as for their contents. When we consider that, on Jesus own admission, the greatest of the commandments is to love the Lord your God with all your mind and heart and soul strength and the second is like to it, namely, to love your neighbour as yourself, then surely we would expect that these two commands would find some direct expression in the words of the Our Father. But, in fact, there is no mention either of the love of God or of the love of neighbour in the Our Father.

How can we account for this strange fact? Perhaps we can account for it by considering that, in giving us the words of the Our Father, Jesus was teaching us how to pray. "Lord, teach us how to pray" the apostles said. Now, we can be taught how to ask for this or that or the next thing but we cannot be taught to love. Love is by its nature a spontaneous thing; it is spontaneous and comes from within or it is false. It comes to us from God, as the book of wisdom says, "as a pure emanation of the Almighty himself" and passes through us to others in an analogous way. It is something that altogether transcends even the most sublime petitions of any prayer.

The closest the Our Father comes to asking for an increase of the love of God is when we say "Hallowed be thy name". In this beautiful phrase we express our delight in our God and our desire that we and all the world come to know and love him ever more for his own divine beauty and goodness and generosity.

On the other hand, the omission of such important petitions as for an increase in the love of God and neighbour may just be one of those very common divine ploys whereby, as St Augustine teaches us, the Divine Spirit of revelation deliberately passes over something very obvious or says something apparently out of place in order to stir up our curiosity and make us consider the truth more closely.

Fr. Raymond

Shekinah

And in the New Testament

http://www.gotquestions.org/shekinah-glory.html

Question: "What is the Shekinah glory?"

Answer: The word shekinah does not appear in the Bible, but the concept clearly does. The Jewish rabbis coined this extra-biblical expression, a form of a Hebrew word that literally means "he caused to dwell," signifying that it was a divine visitation of the presence or dwelling of JEHOVAH God on this earth. The Shekinah was first evident when the Israelites set out from Succoth in their escape from Egypt. There it appeared as a cloudy pillar in the day and a fiery pillar by night: “After leaving Succoth they camped at Etham on the edge of the desert. By day the LORD went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people” (Exodus 13:20-22).

God spoke to Moses out of the pillar of cloud in Exodus 33 assuring him that His Presence would be with the Israelites (v. 9). Verse 11 says God spoke to Moses “face to face” out of the cloud, but when Moses asked to see God’s glory, God told Him: “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live” (v. 20). So apparently, the visible manifestation of God’s glory was somewhat muted. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, God hid Moses in the cleft of a rock, covered his with His hand and passed by. Then He removed His hand and Moses saw only His back. This would seem to indicate that God’s glory is too awesome and powerful to be seen completely by man. 

The visible manifestation of God’s presence was seen not only by the Israelites but also by the Egyptians: “During the last watch of the night the LORD looked down from the pillar of fire and cloud at the Egyptian army and threw it into confusion. He made the wheels of their chariots come off so that they had difficulty driving. And the Egyptians said, "Let's get away from the Israelites! The LORD is fighting for them against Egypt" (Exodus 14:24-25). Just the presence of God’s Shekinah glory was enough to convince His enemies that He was not someone to be resisted.

In the New Testament, Jesus Christ is the dwelling place of God’s glory. Colossians 2:9 tells us that “in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form,” causing Jesus to exclaim to Philip, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). In Christ, we see the visible manifestation of God Himself in the second person of the Trinity. Although His glory was also veiled, Jesus is nonetheless the presence of God on earth. Just as the divine Presence dwelled in a relatively plain tent called the “tabernacle” before the Temple in Jerusalem was built, so did the Presence dwell in the relatively plain man who was Jesus. “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). But when we get to heaven, we will see both the Son and the Father in all their glory and the Shekinah will no longer be veiled (1 John 3:2).