God Dwells among Us

In today's first reading, 1 Kings 8:22-23, 27-30, Solomon is amazed that God, the Creator of the Universe, has entered the Temple. How, he wonders, does God, whom the highest heaven cannot contain, dwell in a temple built by humans. More than that, however, God becomes a human person Himself. He takes on human flesh as the Son of Man, God Incarnate. He becomes one of us and experiences everything about being human, except sin. He is acquainted with sadness and sorrow, rejection and acceptance, joy and gratitude. Because he became human, he knows firsthand what it is like to be treated rudely, arrogantly, abusively, to be spoken to disrespectfully,to be looked down upon with disdain. His feelings have been bruised by sarcasm and ridicule. He's been abandoned, left to die--yes, he has been the man left for dead on the roadside, having been beaten and robbed. He is our homeless and immigrant population, the so-called alien person that people want deported, cast out of their countries, their towns and cities, their parishes and their homes. How can it be so? That is God's love for humanity, a love that is infinite.He is elated when we experience the best of what it means to be human. He grieves when we experience the worst of what it means to be human, when we allow sin in us to have the upper hand over grace. For that reason He became human, died and rose from the dead that we, too, will rise from all that creates death in ourselves and in others. What a great God we have, one like us in all things but sin so that we, too, can become the very holiness of God and realize the best version of ourselves.