Shrine of St. Francis Xavier & Our Lady of Guadalupe at 250 Brown Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49507 US - February 2002: "God is With Us"

We find the theme of the whole season in the word "Emmanuel," "God – With – Us." We have seen God with us in the crib on Christmas. We have seen God with us in the manifestation to the Magi on Epiphany. We have seen God with us as the Messiah, pointed out by John the Baptist and testified to by the Father and the Spirit at the Baptism.

We have seen how the prophecies began to be fulfilled, the promises began to be kept, and the hope of the human race began to be realized as we recognized that God is with us in our own human flesh. What we have been celebrating is that, after many centuries of longing, we can at last truly see God. In Jesus we can watch God live our human life. The full revelation of "God With Us" began with Him.

But that revelation calls for more than just watching, like spectators looking on from the outside. Jesus calls us to much more than that. When we are baptized, we are drawn into the mission, the vocation, of Jesus Himself. We commit ourselves to His mission and vocation of showing what God is like.

Baptism makes us members of God’s family. The whole family as such is called to be the place where God is with us. Anyone who comes into our family circle should recognize God’s presence in us, God living in us. That is the ideal, the goal, for the whole Church. It is the goal of every parish community and the goal of every diocesan community.

We all have a vocation to that goal – to be such that God is visible and recognizable in our Church. Whatever we do to further the reign of God, we do it, not simply as individual believers, but as members of the Church. We do it because we believe that in this way the work of Jesus continues in and through the Church. God continues to be present, and to be revealed as present, in our midst.

It is important to keep in mind always what our basic mission is: to help all people know that God came to be among us and is still with us.

Whatever particular kind of work we personally are in, we are each part of this family, the Church, in whom God wants to be "God-with-Us." That is our faith, and it does affect the way in which we perform our service. It does affect the way in which we interact with anyone who comes along. If God is with us, that makes us different somehow.

In just a week and a half we enter the Lenten-Easter season. This is the season when the Church asks each of us to renew and deepen the commitment of our baptism. We are reminded of our vocation to be the image of God, the proof that the promises of old have been fulfilled: God is with us. May the graces of this next season help us to become more fully what God wants us to be.

+Robert J. Rose