You have been told, O mortal, what is good,
and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice and to love goodness,
and to walk humbly with your God.
(Micah 6:8)
To know what the Lord require of us is a never-ending quest through the entire course of our lives.
Traditionally, as a child, we may have been taught that part of the answer was to obey the commandments and laws of God and of the Church. In practice, it also usually included to do what our parents, family, clan, friends, fellow believers, fellow citizens, and others who influence our lives told us was right and proper.
In the previous verses Micah posed the question with some examples of the traditional answers of his time:
With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow before God most high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with myriad streams of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my crime,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
(Micah 6:6-7)
He used some extreme examples of types of sacrifices that were considered possible requirements of God.
We do something similar ourselves in raising our children, when we give them long lists of does and don’ts, sometimes in great detail.
No wonder that we tend to think first of guilt and sinfulness when the question of what the Lord require of us comes up.
Look at our traditions and rituals. What an emphasis we give to the negative, to sacrifice, atonement, mortification, and giving up pleasurable things when we think about how we stand with God and what he requires of us.
Jesus taught us to address God in prayer as a father, as a loving parent, not as supreme being, master of the universe, or an all-powerful and demanding judge and ruler.
Hopefully we may have been blessed by having a loving parent and so have some positive appreciation of this image of God. And, even if we had a parent limited in his or her ability to love and care for us, we probably yearned for and imagined a better.
With good parents, we have only to reach out to be embraced, consoled, understood, accepted, and loved. We never doubt their limits to respond compassionately and forgive our offenses. We even reluctantly understand the fairness of some of the restrictions or punishments they placed upon us.
We’re not fundamentally afraid of a good parent, nor totally concealing our behavior. We instinctively trust them to be merciful and forgiving.
Micah might not have had precisely this kind of image and understanding of God, but he certainly would have understood it.
As a prophet and teacher he was accentuating the positive, encouraging focusing on the underlying nature of the Lord, and trying to liberate those who heard his word from being over whelmed by their failings and need for punishment and atonement.
It’s strange, isn’t it, that, even though probably we all more or less always knew this, in practice we still often tend to act as though God is to be feared and judge ourselves more harshly than we may deserve.
It’s almost a kind of egoism, that we can be so unforgiving of our limitations and so imagining of deserved punishment for them.
Remember, what Jesus requires of us is to “Love one another as I have loved you!”
5 September 2021