The Old Testament reading for today comes from Ecclus. 43:1-22.  In it, the writer extols the greatness of God and the extraordinary wonders He has created.  There are marvelous things, he says, and there are things well beyond our imagination. When you praise God, he urges, praise Him with all your strength.   The reading is really a hymn to the awesome, if some what distant, character of God.

The New Testament reading for today further affirms the extraordinary struggle in which God is engaged.  At Rev. 14:14-15:8, the prophet foresees a time when great plagues come to the earth, and some men suffer terribly.   It is a strange world, whose suffering can seem distant and alien to us, even though the text firmly suggests that the prophecy is not merely metaphorical.

And then there is the Gospel reading for today, Luke 13:10-17. In our lives, where does Jesus stand in the middle of all this? Between the awesome character of God the Father and the terrible struggles of the apocalypse, where is the Messiah? In today's reading, he is at a temple, where is healing a woman who has suffered 18 years from an infirmity.   He does this on the sabbath, and his timing prompts some people to say (to her), could you not have waited one more day? Must you profane the sabbath, that most holy of times, here in the temple, that most holy of places, just to end almost two decades of suffering one single day earlier than otherwise?   After all, they might have said, there are other people here, many of whom have come to celebrate this day in this space in just the right way--how about a little consideration? Jesus reacts harshly to the critics.  Don't they save an ox on the sabbath when it needs rescue, he asks? Of course they did, because the law expressly allowed doing so under some circumstances.  The critics were ashamed.

Our lives are lived in the shadow of an awesome God on what may be the eve of the apocalypse, at least when viewed from the aspect of eternity.  Our daily existence ought to reflect these extraordinary facts. But that existence should also, and more emphatically, reflect the fact that our Savior came to do his work of healing, focused on real human beings, in the everyday lives of ordinary people, without any constraints imposed by convention (particularly religious convention), however well intentioned.  It is not merely that he humbled himself: it is also that he exalted God's love among us.  May we do likewise in our lives.