Daily Mass Reading Reflection (Nov 14, 2024)

Look!

In the Gospel today, Jesus’s remarks remind me of a common phenomenon throughout the Gospels but also in much of human experience, though it is applied differently. This is the “problem of divine hiddenness.” This is the concept that God, though he is understood by Christians and classical theists to be omnipresent, is not obviously present to us in the same way that the material creation is.

This “hiddenness” can prove scandalous for some and even qualifies as an objection for some to belief in God. Philosophers place it under the “problem of evil” objection, in this case the “evil” is not moral but metaphysical, the “evil” as a privation of knowledge of God’s presence. 

Many who have studied the Gospels have also noted something strange about many of Jesus’s interactions where he tells them to “tell no one” of what he told them or the miracle he performed. These scenes make up what is known as the “Messianic secret,” which refers to the idea that Jesus wanted to keep his identity as the Jewish messiah as secret in order to fulfill his mission. There is still debate as to exactly why and what this mission entails, but an acceptable interpretation in the Catholicism is that he wanted to make sure he had a chance to eat the Passover meal, institute the Eucharist and the priesthood, and fulfill the Paschal Mystery as understood in Sacramental Theology.

It is interesting that Jesus parallels the “Look, here it is” in reference to the Kingdom of God with the “Look, here he is” in reference to himself (Luke 17, my emphasis). Just as the Kingdom of God cannot be observed, so too cannot his divinity be observed in his earthly ministry, but “in his day” it, or he, will not be avoidable. 

This revelation, which has already begun through the Church, is one of the many wrongs that are righted in the world. God has become exponentially more widely known, less hidden, since the institution of the Eucharist through the Church, both representing the visible presence of God in the world and both of which are rightly known as the Body of Christ.