You remember what it was like last year at this time? For weeks and months on end you were unable to see your mother, your brother or your best friend.
Oh, sure, you could chat with them on Zoom, but that just wasn’t the same. Face to screen is not the same thing as face to face.
I can remember in late summer, waiting outside a sandwich shop in West Stockbridge waiting to see my oldest and best friend for the first time in six months. I remember just sitting there and wondering what it would be like, after six months, to see his face again, or at least his eyes above the blue surgical mask. And it was so good to see him.
We long to see the face of the those whom we love…face to face.
That’s how we long to see the face of God. The Hebrew word for face is pānîm, and it’s used in reference to seeing the face of God over a hundred times in the Old Testament. For how much we long to see God’s face.
And it’s not a vain hope, for we can call God “you” —- he has a face and we can enter into a relationship with him. As our beloved Pope emeritus reminds us,
God is certainly above all things, but still he talks to us, he listens to us, he sees us, he speaks to us, he makes a covenant, he is capable of love.1
In 1979, archaeologists excavating a tomb near Jerusalem discovered two small silver scrolls that recorded a priestly blessing from the sixth book of Numbers. The scrolls were dated to the 7th century B.C., making them the oldest written Scriptures we have ever found.
These ancient silver scrolls preserved an even more ancient blessing, which since Aaron has been prayed by priests over their people:
May the Lord Bless you and keep you.
May the Lord make his face to shine on you,
and be gracious to you.
May the Lord uncover his face to you and bring you peace.2
May the Lord make his face to shine upon you…may he uncover his face to you and bring you peace! It’s an answer to the Responsorial refrain we sang just this morning: “Lord, let your face shine on us.”
That’s why we read in the Book of Exodus, “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.”3 For this was a foreshadowing of what we would experience in Jesus, in whom the search for the face of God is at an end…in him we see and touch and even consume all there is to know and experience about God, “the sum total of Revelation.”4
Again, to our beloved emeritus:
Jesus shows us God’s face and makes God’s name known to us. In the Priestly Prayer at the Last Supper he says to the Father: “I have manifested your name to them...I made known to them your name”5…For “whoever sees him, sees the Father,”6 as he said to Philip.7
So….we long to see God’s face. We long to see, Jesus, who introduces us to the Father when he teaches us the Lord’s Prayer, and (as I will say in a few minutes) “we dare to call him Father.” The word for Father in Hebrew, which Jesus would have used, is Abba. Just like daddy, or pappa. Abba!
Which brings me to a story I may have told you already, but, no matter, it gets better each time I tell it.
It goes back more than forty years, when I was with two of my brother seminarians on an old Arab bus bumping along a dusty backroad from Tiberius to Jerusalem.
At the heart of the story is a five year old boy who climbed onto the bus, holding the hand of his father. Father and son were Hasidim (good orthodox Jews, who only spoke Hebrew) and they each dressed identically, with dark pants, white buttoned shirts, black hats with their ultra-orthodox curls on either side and the little tassels from their prayer shawls hanging below their waists. The father spoke to the boy softly in Hebrew while they moved to stand in the back of the bus, all the seats having now been taken.
As we continued to bump along in the old school bus, half the Israeli countryside crammed into that little aisle, including young soldiers with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders and finally an old man with a goat. Yes, a goat, which stood just to my right in the aisle.
When the little Hasidim boy at the back of the bus spotted the goat, his eyes grew big as saucers, and overcome with curiosity he pulled his hand from his father’s and fought his way down the aisle as only a five-year-old can do. When he got to the goat he stared, then smiled (I half expected the goat to smile back) and cautiously began to play with the goats beard, then pet him on the head and then conduct an extended conversation with him in their native Hebrew.
But, as five-year-olds do, he soon grew bored with his new adventure, so he turned to go back to him father, who had been smiling at him during the whole course of this wild adventure. But the boy couldn’t see his father from way down there near the goat. All he could see were the big Israeli soldiers with their guns, and the funny looking blind man with his lunchbox and the young Americans all staring at him and he panicked, yelling at the top of his lungs “Abba! Abba! Abba!”
He was desperate to see the face of his Father, who pushed through the crowd and swept him up in his arms. And when the little boy saw Abba’s face through his years, he began to giggle.
As we will, on that blessed last day, when we shall see the Lord, bask in the light of his glory, and see him face to face.
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1 - Benedict XVI, 16 January 2013.
2 - Num 6:24-26.
3 - Exodus 33:11.
4 - Dei Verbum, no. 2.
5 - cf. Jn 17:6; 6, 26.
6- cf. Jn 14:9.
7 - Benedict XVI, 16 January 2013.
