God with Us

We should keep an eye and an ear open in the liturgy and in our reading of the Bible to pick up the many references to God being ‘with’ us and his other chosen servants, so that we can appreciate their full theological significance. This should encourage us to appreciate the depth and all the implications of the apparently simple universal greeting with which we Christians are so familiar that it glides off our minds regularly without our appreciating it: “The Lord be with you.’  Hearing this from the priest at Mass should stop us regularly in our tracks: it is not just a blessing, it is always also a challenge. As we see throughout the Bible, it implies a previous particular commission that we have personally received from God. It should remind us that God promises to be always ‘with us’, as the risen Jesus promised his disciples (Matthew 28:20), regardless of – even because of – our inadequacies, so that God can bring about through us what he is asking of us at this moment in our lives. That’s the point.

Excerpted from Sacred Space: The Companion by The Irish Jesuits (p.68)