Daily word, 20 Jul 19

15^th Saturday of the Year (20 Jul 2019)

Ex 12. 37-42; Ps 136; Mt 12. 14-21

Homily of Fr. Paul Panaretos, S.J., 8-day directed retreat

Restored

Originally the painting was known not by title but by its commission: Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. Over years its varnish darkened. 155 years later its darkness suggested the title by which we know it: “The Night Watch.”¹ This month its restoration begins before the public at the Rijksmuseum and online.² We shall see it as Rembrandt painted it: the militia moving out of a gloomy courtyard into the “full blaze of day”³: a move of liberation from darkness into light. The Christian tradition describes God as Light from light.⁴ Liberation also is life lived in God to any who welcomes it.

God’s liberation of the Hebrews occurred on God’s eternal watch: it was a night of watching by the Eternal, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; so this same night is a night of watching kept to the Eternal by all the people of Israel throughout their generations. In Martin Buber’s phrasing, “the history feast par excellence of the world [is] not a feast of pious remembrance.”⁵ It participates in God’s saving action.

To watch with God is to enjoy God’s mercy and to show it in one’s life. Results of not watching with God can infect even the pious. The Pharisees idolized piety. They watched every action: theirs and everyone’s: was each piously done? That blinded them from watching with God. As a result they suffered feverish envy of Jesus.

The logic of envy is murder: remove the one who possesses honour, respect or wealth I do not. Envy so overwhelmed the Pharisees that they turned to their hated rivals, Herod and his sympathizers,⁶ to rid Jesus from them forever. Watching with God instead of watching out for themselves, their customs and traditions⁷ would have turned them against envy and its hateful action. Watching with God would have filled them with God’s light and  life.

Jesus watched with God and invited his disciples to watch with God. Like other 1^st-Century Mediterraneans Jesus offered models, both ones to follow and to avoid. Desire what God desires, mercy,⁸ Jesus repeated to the religious professionals. To his disciples Jesus said, Watch out, and beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.⁹

Watching with God includes discerning. To discern ways God invites us into the “full blaze of [God’s living] day” is to be taught by God. To follow through God teaching us does not idolize piety. To follow through God teaching us keeps vigil for the Eternal and welcomes the Eternal’s enduring mercy. Retreating in God’s mercy allows God to restore us. We begin to know ourselves as God knows us: loved; led; liberated; carried—at every moment.

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1. 10 things you may not know about Rembrandt’s Night Watch hosted by the painting’s home, The Rijksmuseum.
2. Operation Night Watch.
3. Rembrandt and the Nightwatch.
4. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 242.
5. W. Gunther Plaut & David E. Stein, eds., The Torah: A Modern Commen-tary, Revised; Accordance electronic ed. (New York: Union for Reform Judaism, 2006), 425.
6. Matthew 22.16; Mark 3.6.
7. Matthew 15.2, 6.
8. Matthew 9.13; 12.7.
9. Matthew 16.6, 11.

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Wiki-images Night Watch, detail1. PD-US; Evil Counsel PD-US