LIFT UP YOUR gaze (JOHN 3:14-21)
Today’s Gospel is a description of light tapping at a window. The light filtering through the pane urges us to make a choice: do we want to take the high road and go forth, or do we prefer to hide behind a wall? The impassioned call we hear in today’s Gospel–namely, the invitation to choose a life of truth and light–is yet another invitation on the part of God, who has no patience with what does not change, what does not move ahead, what refuses to go through the labor of birth.
Light from light, the soaring of angels, competitive races, conversions, God as a breath of wind that opens the doors of hearts, as a voice that descends from heaven, as a torn veil in the Temple….
In Jesus, descriptions of the divine and the human intertwine and they are always descriptions of movement: calls, departures, journeys…. Faith in the God of Israel’s Fathers, as described in the Gospel, is a story of spiritual migrations, metamorphoses, the conversion of hearts.
The present moment is a time to embrace the wind that lifts us up to paths that are perhaps disorderly but free and, above all, alive.
