Encountering the holiness of God

5th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Is 6:1-2a, 3-8
Second Reading: 1 Cor 15:1-11
 Gospel Reading: Lk 5:1-11

In this Sunday’s First Reading, Isaiah “saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty.” Even “the hem of his robe filled the temple.” The seraphim attending him called to one another incessantly, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!”

Consider that word “holy.” When God first called Moses from the burning bush, Moses went over to look, but God said, “Come no nearer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.”

Consider the human reaction to God’s holiness. Isaiah said, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” When St. Peter realized who Jesus must be, he “fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.’”

This reaction could be called “awe,” but the word has become debased. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls it “fear of the Lord,” one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit at our Confirmation. It is not flight from threat, nor pure terror, nor simply alarm or fright; it is experience and knowledge of God as utterly holy, totally other, incomprehensible, absolute, all-powerful, all-knowing, and absolutely majestic.

Many ancient religions recognized the quality in the supernatural that excites awe in humans, but only the Jews “fully and unambiguously identified the awful presence haunting black mountain-tops and thunderclouds with ‘the righteous Lord,’” says C.S. Lewis.

Some people think we should banish religious fear from our spiritual life. It is true that St. John said that “perfect love casts out all fear”—but, notes Lewis, so do “ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity.” It is desirable that we should reach the perfection of love in which fear has no place, but it is very undesirable, before we reach that stage, that anything else should banish it.

It is difficult to contemplate God as this Sunday’s readings portray him; we prefer to think of him as a loving Father. However, our image of the Father’s love can degenerate into senile benevolence instead of the burning fire of the Trinity’s inmost being, which filled the temple with smoke.

Consider the name God gave himself when he first told Moses to speak to the Israelites for him. “If they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what am I to tell them?” Moses questioned, and God answered, “I am who am…. This is my name forever; this is my title for all generations.”

The Catechism says that “I am” is both the revelation of a name and something like the refusal of a name. It is “mysterious, just as God is mystery,” and so it “better expresses God as what he is: infinitely above everything that we can understand or say.”

God’s unutterable name contains the truth that only God simply is, says the Catechism. Only he is the fullness of being and of every perfection, without origin or end, permanent and unchangeable. Everything he has created receives all it is and all it has from him, but he is everything that he is of himself. He alone is his very being.

Out of respect, the Jews, when they read sacred Scripture, replace God’s name with the title “Lord,” and, traditionally, Christians have done the same. (Two Vatican documents—Liturgiam Authenticam in 2001 and Letter to Bishops’ Conferences on the Name of God in 2008—have ruled that the name Yahweh not be used in the liturgy or in translations of the Bible.)

You can understand how the Jews felt, then, when, centuries after Moses, they heard Jesus say, “I solemnly declare it: before Abraham came to be, I am.”

Meditate on God’s name, for our joy in heaven will be to contemplate God as he is. That will satisfy us forever; that is the happiness we were made for.