Readings:
Reflection:
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In the film Silence, two Jesuit priests in 1639 travel to Japan in order to seek out their brother Jesuit who went missing while serving as a missionary. Unfortunately this is a time when Japan did not take kindly to Christians, imprisoning and killing them.
As these two priests travel seeking their brother, they try to minister to all they can. Eventually though, one of their members, Kichijirō, betrays them, leading the arrests and deaths of many of his fellow Christians.
One of the Jesuits, Rodrigues, gets placed in a cell after his fellow brother dies. Eventually, Kichijirō is once again arrested and placed in the cell next to Rodrigues. He asks the priest to hear his confession. We see Rodrigues almost visibly roll his eyes after all Kichijirō has done, yet he still consents to hear him. Kichijirō is later released while Rodrigues awaits his fate.
Rodrigues eventual succeeds in his goal. He finds his lost brother, only to learn that he has been forced to convert to Buddhism and exam objects to see whether they have any Christian significance. Rodrigues is forced to do the same, and Kichijirō shows up again as his assistant. One day Kichijirō approaches Rodrigues and asks him to hear his confession, even after all this time and having publicly renounced his Faith.
There’s something that keeps Kichijirō coming back to the church, even though time and time again he betrays his fellow Christians. Even as he is annoyed at him, Rodrigues takes Kichijirō back in.
The past two Sundays, our readings from the Prophets have reflected this message. We’ve seen God ask Hosea to take a wife who is guaranteed to be unfaithful to him. Hosea then takes his wife back after each time she sins against him.
God asks this monumental task of Hosea to reflect the Lord’s own love for Israel. As we saw in the previous Sunday reading, God is very angry at the Israelites for their wandering away, and rightly so. God brought the Israelites out of Egypt. God continued to bring them through the wilderness, even when the Israelites invented their own god while waiting for the 10 Commandments. God stood by the Israelites even when they rejected the Lord by asking the Prophet Samuel to grant them a king to rule them instead.
Yet for all this anger, God still loves them. The Lord tells them so in Hosea 11. God will not stay angry at them forever. The Lord will come to their aid and bring them back from exile into the Land of Promise.
God could remain rightly infuriated by Israel, just as the Jesuit Rodrigues had every right to be angry at Kichijirō. Yet God doesn’t. Even after every time the Israelites abandon the Lord, God still brings them back in. God still loves the Israelites even when they, like Hosea’s wife Gomer, fail to remain faithful.
The same is true for us. Even though we fail to love the Lord, our God continues to love us. In fact, God loves us so much that He came down to this world in the form of Jesus to be one of us and to dies for us in order to pave the way back for us to our Lord.
Though we sin, God still loves us, even as God rolls the eyes, sighs at us, does a facepalm because of our actions, and gets rightly angry at us. So we should stop wandering away. We should not be like Kichijirō or Gomer in their sins any longer. We are now called to remain with our Lord who, after all, died so that we could be with Him always.