If we want to meet God, we have to take risks and go on a journey because a comfortable Christian will never know God’s face. Based on today’s reading from the Book of Genesis (Gn 1,20-2,4), which talks about the creation of man in God’s image, we think about the right and wrong path for a Christian who wants to know his identity. He cannot sit in a comfortable chair and flip through a book because no encyclopedia contains a „ God“ image. He will not find God’s image even in a computer. Nor is it reflected in comfortable obedience to rules that have nothing to do with God, said the Holy Father.
Kit will not set out on a journey, it will never recognize the form of God, it will never find God’s face. Sitting Christians, comfortably idle Christians, do not recognize God’s face. They don’t know him. They say: ‚God is so, so…‘ But they don’t know him. Furthermore, they are comfortable. For walking, the restlessness that God himself has placed in our hearts and that drives us forward to seek him is necessary. Let us consider the right and wrong image of God. Embark on a journey where God or life will test us. Risking, overcoming dangers, and feeling infirmity and small-mindedness from fatigue, great men like the prophet Elijah, Jeremiah, and Job also struggled in this way.
Then there is another way: to remain in comfortable peace and, therefore, to falsify the search for God. Based on the Gospel episode (Mk 7.1-13), in which the scribes and Pharisees accuse Jesus of why his disciples eat without observing ritual purification: In the Gospel, Jesus meets people who are afraid to go on a journey who come to terms with a particular caricature of God. It’s a fake ID. These unsettling silenced the restlessness of the heart, painted God with commandments, and forgot God. ‚ Neglecting God’s commandments, you follow human traditions.‘ And so they turn away from God, do not walk towards God, and invent or do another commandment when they have some uncertainty.
People who behave like this are on the road only in quotation marks; it is a road on which they are not moving anywhere. Today, the liturgy forces us to think about these two texts, two identity cards. About the one we all have, because the Lord created us that way, and who tells us: ‚ Get up, and you will know your identity, because you are God’s image, you are made in the likeness of God. Get up and seek God.‘ And about the latter: ‚No, stay satisfied. Fulfill all these commands, this is God, this is God’s face.‘ – May the Lord give us all the grace of courage to always go on the path to seek the Lord’s face, that face that one day we will see, but that we have to look for here on Earth.
