[Catholic Caucus] The Sacred Page: Is God a Person or “The Force”? The Readings for the 2nd Week in Ordinary Time

George Lucas concocted an interesting religion for his Star Wars film series by combining elements of Christianity and eastern religion. Ultimate reality, or “God,” in Star Wars turns out to be “the Force,” an impersonal power with a “dark” and “light” side, similar to the way many forms of eastern religion conceive of the divine. So, instead of the Christian farewell “May God be with you,” Star Wars characters say, “May the Force be with you!”

Is that the ultimate nature of reality? An impersonal force which is neither good nor evil but somehow combines both? Or does nature ultimately come from a loving and personal Being, who created us for a relationship with Himself?

The readings for this Sunday’s Mass come down clearly in favor of the personal view of God and reality.

Our First Reading recounts the call of Samuel, one of Israel’s greatest prophets, the one who would ultimately anoint Israel’s greatest king, David:

Samuel was sleeping in the temple of the LORD where the ark of God was. The LORD called to Samuel, who answered, "Here I am." Samuel ran to Eli and said, "Here I am. You called me." "I did not call you, " Eli said. "Go back to sleep." So he went back to sleep. Again the LORD called Samuel, who rose and went to Eli. "Here I am, " he said. "You called me." But Eli answered, "I did not call you, my son. Go back to sleep."

At that time Samuel was not familiar with the LORD, because the LORD had not revealed anything to him as yet. The LORD called Samuel again, for the third time. Getting up and going to Eli, he said, "Here I am. You called me." Then Eli understood that the LORD was calling the youth. So he said to Samuel, "Go to sleep, and if you are called, reply, Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening." When Samuel went to sleep in his place, the LORD came and revealed his presence, calling out as before, "Samuel, Samuel!" Samuel answered, "Speak, for your servant is listening."

Samuel grew up, and the LORD was with him, not permitting any word of his to be without effect.

The LORD calls Samuel by his name in an audible voice—a rare but not unheard-of privilege in salvation history. Nothing is more personal than a name. We all love to hear our name called, and perk up our ears when we hear it. We’ve all experienced the awkwardness of forgetting someone’s name—sometimes even the name of someone we know fairly well, but if we run into them after a lapse of a few years, or in a context where we don’t usually meet them (like at the grocery store), our memory temporary fails us. Unable to evoke their name, we can’t renew our relationship with the person.

God knows us by name. He is personal, and knows us as persons. That’s part of what it means to be made in the image of God.

In this Reading, Samuel provides us an example of growth in faith. Many of us are “cradle Catholics” or at least “cradle Christians”—we grew up raised in Christian homes, learning to pray and worship from childhood.

Yet for each of us, there comes a time when we have to embrace a personal relationship with God, a direct relationship no longer mediated by our parents or others who may have raised us. We have to come to an awareness that God has a unique call and purpose for our lives, and we have to embrace that vocation. If we never make this transition, we end up losing the faith or simply “going through the motions” for the rest of our lives.

At the beginning of this Reading, Samuel’s relationship to God is mediated through his adopted father, the priest Eli. But by the end of the narrative, Samuel has learned to hear God for himself and submit to God’s will for his life. In fact, the message that God delivers to Samuel (1 Samuel 3:11-18) actually concerns judgment on Samuel’s mentor, Eli.

The Responsorial Psalm continues to pursue this theme. The traditional Hebrew text labels Psalm 40 “a psalm of David,” and we are to understand the Psalm as his words of prayer to God:

R. Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.
I have waited, waited for the LORD,
and he stooped toward me and heard my cry.
And he put a new song into my mouth,
a hymn to our God. R.

Sacrifice or offering you wished not,
but ears open to obedience you gave me.
Holocausts or sin-offerings you sought not;
then said I, "Behold I come." R.

"In the written scroll it is prescribed for me,
to do your will, O my God, is my delight,
and your law is within my heart!" R.

I announced your justice in the vast assembly;
I did not restrain my lips, as you, O LORD, know. R.

David was remembered in Israel’s history for the intensity of his relationship with the LORD, an intensity captured in the deeply personal and emotional language of so many of the psalms. David uses strong language to emphasize that merely going through the formalities of worship does not satisfy God’s will for us:
Sacrifice or offering you wished not, but ears open to obedience you gave me. Holocausts or sin-offerings you sought not; then said I, "Behold I come."

The words are not to be taken strictly literally—both Samuel and David worshipped God in the public liturgy and offered sacrifices as prescribed by Moses. But external worship is not pleasing without the interior and personal consent of our will. Obedience to God’s will, the embrace of his purpose for our life—these are fundamental:

Samuel says something similar (1 Samuel 15:22):
Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.

God is not satisfied with "going through the motions." The relationship God desires for us is so profoundly intimate that the Scriptures speak of it using the image of marriage, and St. Paul draws out the implications for our sexual activity:

[Brothers and sisters]: The body is not for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body; God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power.

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? But whoever is joined to the Lord becomes one Spirit with him. Avoid immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the immoral person sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been purchased at a price. Therefore glorify God in your body.

Contemporary atheist culture views sex as merely a physical act whose purpose is pleasure. The result is that people in modern society experience sex with more and more partners, but with less and less love. In the words of Tina Turner, “What’s love got to do with it?” If we are all just cosmic accidents, what meaning can love have anyway? Only real persons can love. Biological machines accidentally descended from an amoeba can’t love, they can only follow biological urges to reproduce their selfish genes.

The Bible obviously does not view sex this way. In the Scripture, sex is a physical act with a personal meaning. The meaning is a total gift of self. Even in the Old Testament, a sexual act obligated a man to marry the woman he slept with (Exod 22:16). He had to live up to the meaning of the statement he had made with his body. Sex has a spiritual dimension—it is the uniting of persons, not just bodies. Through baptism and the Eucharist, all of us are wed to Christ first and foremost. We are joined to him body and spirit, and not free to “share” ourselves with others. We belong to Someone who knows, loves, and desires us personally. Love has a great deal to do with it, Tina!

John was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he said, "Behold, the Lamb of God." The two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following him and said to them, "What are you looking for?" They said to him, "Rabbi" - which translated means Teacher -, "where are you staying?" He said to them, "Come, and you will see." So they went and saw where Jesus was staying, and they stayed with him that day. It was about four in the afternoon.

Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, was one of the two who heard John and followed Jesus. He first found his own brother Simon and told him, "We have found the Messiah" - which is translated Christ -. Then he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, "You are Simon the son of John; you will be called Cephas" - which is translated Peter.

Jesus not only knows Peter’s name—“you are Simon, son of John,”—he also gives Peter a name (“Cephas,” Aramaic for “Rock”), the mark of a close relationship. Usually only parents give us our names—or perhaps a spouse creates a nickname for us.

It is not just Peter who receives “a new name” when he encounters Jesus—in a sense, we all do. Revelation 2:17 promises:
To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it.’ The idea of a “new name” in Christ is represented in the liturgy when, for example, we adopt “a new name” for the Sacrament of Confirmation.

A friend of mine has several endearing nicknames for his wife that he uses in public, but I would never call his wife by those nicknames! That would be inappropriate—the nicknames are a personal thing between himself and his wife that convey the affection and closeness between them. My wife Dawn and I have our own “pet” names for each other. The idea of a “new name” given by Christ expresses the intimacy of our relationship with him. In today’s Gospel, Jesus does not call some random person to be the foundation “Rock” of his Church. He calls Simon son of John, a fisherman in first century Galilee with a strong personality and impulsive temperament. He accepts him with all the virtues, foibles, and peculiarities that make him unique, that make him “Peter.”

The Bible insists God is no impersonal “Force.” He is the person, Jesus Christ. He comes to us in this Mass and gives his body for and to each one of us. He calls us by name and commissions us for a path of service unique to each one. May we each respond, “Here I am, Lord, I come to do your will.”

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Please keep in mind that this is a Catholic Caucus/Devotional thread for the purpose of prayerful reflection on the Sacred Scriptures and is closed to debate of any kind. Per FR policy on Religion Caucus threads, off-topic, argumentative, and abusive comments are not allowed and will be submitted to the Mods for deletion. Thanks, and God bless you.

“We don’t know. G-d is beyond our comprehension.”

God is not totally beyond our comprehension since He has revealed himself through nature, reason, and divine revelation, though it is true that He is beyond our complete comprehension. As the saying goes, "If I understood God, I would be God."

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

CCC 286 Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason,122 even if this knowledge is often obscured and disfigured by error. This is why faith comes to confirm and enlighten reason in the correct understanding of this truth: "By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear."123

CCC 287 The truth about creation is so important for all of human life that God in his tenderness wanted to reveal to his People everything that is salutary to know on the subject. Beyond the natural knowledge that every man can have of the Creator,124 God progressively revealed to Israel the mystery of creation. He who chose the patriarchs, who brought Israel out of Egypt, and who by choosing Israel created and formed it, this same God reveals himself as the One to whom belong all the peoples of the earth, and the whole earth itself; he is the One who alone "made heaven and earth".125

CCC 288 Thus the revelation of creation is inseparable from the revelation and forging of the covenant of the one God with his People. Creation is revealed as the first step towards this covenant, the first and universal witness to God's all-powerful love.126 And so, the truth of creation is also expressed with growing vigor in the message of the prophets, the prayer of the psalms and the liturgy, and in the wisdom sayings of the Chosen People.127

122 Cf. Vatican Council I, can. 2 § I: DS 3026.
123 Heb 11:3.
124 Cf. Acts 17:24-29; Rom 1:19-20.
125 Cf. Isa 43:1; Ps 115:15; 124:8; 134:3.
126 Cf. Gen 15:5; Jer 33:19-26.
127 Cf. Isa 44:24; Ps 104; Prov 8:22-31.

What’s a “person?”

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

CCC 357 Being in the image of God the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone. He is capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons. And he is called by grace to a covenant with his Creator, to offer him a response of faith and love that no other creature can give in his stead.

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