Fr James and the Saints
Feast of St John of the Cross:
Balaam the Prophet, the star of today’s first reading, was no prophet of Israel, but rather one of the gentile tribes during the times of the Israel’s journey towards the Promised Land. He was an honest man and, no matter how much wealth he was offered, he spoke no prophecy except that which he would receive from the Lord. As the king of the Moabites saw the other tribes fall before the Israel’s advance, he sought out Balaam to cast a curse upon the Israelites. Balaam, in response, proclaimed the words he received from the Lord: that the Israelites are not cursed, but blessed and held specially before God. Time and again, the Moabite king asked Balaam to offer more sacrifices and seek more divinations in hopes that the subsequent answer would be the one he wanted, but each time Balaam could only pronounce God’s blessing upon Israel. The Moabite king’s obstinance would be his undoing and by his repeated refusal to acknowledge the will of God, he gradually brought a curse upon himself: the curse of a hardened heart, walling himself off from recognizing and receiving the goodness of God into his life.
This hardness of heart is hardly an isolated occurrence. In the Old Testament, we hear about Pharaoh’s hardened heart rejecting the Moses’ appeals until it cost him the life of every Egyptian first-born son, his own included. In today’s Gospel, we witness the hard-hearted Pharisees, whose pride and rejection of John the Baptist trapped them and kept them from recognizing that their long-awaited Messiah was standing right in front them. Holding so tightly to one’s own will and one’s own plans, especially to the exclusion of God’s, means throwing out, locking out, and missing out on the goodness, joy, and salvation which God readily offers each of us.
If that is a hardened heart, what does an open heart look like? A good example is found in the life of St. John of the Cross, whose feast is today. John was a humble man of 16th Century Spain tasked with reforming the monks of the Carmelite Order, monks who would respond by kidnapping, beating, imprisoning, and nearly starving him. Strangely enough, on borrowed scraps of paper, this was when John penned some of history’s greatest theological love poetry: stories of God and a soul in the words of a Lover wooing His beloved and the beloved’s longing search for the One she loves. John’s open heart was able to recognize God’s loving presence to him, even in the midst of his unjust imprisonment and suffering, and in Him, John found joy in God’s closeness and strength to love and forgive his captors. Where a hardened heart rejects joy wherever it might be found, a heart opened to God can find it even in the most unlikely places, even in a humble manger on a cold winter’s night.
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