Jesus taught people about God, even in the face of death! This may be a strange way to begin a blog, but it is accurate, and at the same time thought provoking. Today’s Gospel, Matthew 14, 1-12, reads like a satanic modern day novel. It addresses the lust of Herod for Herodias, the wife of his brother, Philip. An evil oath made and a horrible promise kept. All of this happens because a young girl, Herodias’ daughter, dances before him. And then, it speaks of the beheading of John the Baptist, the cousin and friend of Jesus.
Why would Herod do something atrocious like this? To a man, that he quietly admired? That is one thought that screams out at us. Another thought is how did Jesus feel when He heard the news and the manner of John’s death? He was a man. He knew fear and sadness, just as you and I. John had reprimanded Herod, telling him that it was not lawful for him to lust after Herodias. For this John’s head was severed from his body to satisfy the wrath of the woman.
Jesus was preaching a revolution within people’s hearts and minds. He was advocating peace and love, not war and lust. He did not seek out wealth and riches. He could be found with the sick, the dying, the sinner, and the wretched of the earth. He was not addressing just one evil. He was overturning the lives of everyone. His call was for each person to review their lives, to see what it is, inside them that is preventing them from honoring their Father in heaven. Jesus knew that all mankind was suffering. It was suffering then; and it is suffering today. If John was beheaded, how much worse would Jesus’ own death be? “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” Yes, Jesus knew fear. He also knew, and preached with His own life, that good shall not bow down to evil.
He tells us, here in the 21st century that our lives must be lived in a manner that has concern for all. We cannot judge others. We must not. Each person that we see riding the bus, or the subway, each parent pushing a stroller, each service provider, every person that we pass by…all are struggling, are searching, all are wondering, “why me?” No one can point a finger. Not you. Not me. ALL are struggling. We don’t like this person. We don’t like that action. That person annoys us…we don’t know why… but that person annoys us. We allow our feelings, our anger, our frustrations, and our hurt to rule our lives. We should know better. We have been taught how we should live, and yet we do as we please. And Jesus, our Teacher, still says, “Come, follow Me.”
Tag Archive: our life
Today, is May 21, 2011. We hear and see many declarations of the world’s end. Could it end today? Certainly, it could. Could it end tomorrow? Again, we have to answer with a “yes”. It could also end a thousand years from now or any day in between. Each day has the same degree of possibility. As we hear in the Bible, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away. But of that day or hour no man knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray. For ye know not when the time is.” -1
Man has a fascination with the end-time. What will happen? How will it happen? What will be left? Man’s curiousity and inquisitiveness comes into play with full force, here. And yet, we should just ask ourselves, “Why do we want to know”? “Are we changing our lives for the better?” The only thing we know for sure is that time will most certainly, run out. The when should really not be important to us. What is important is what are we doing with the time available?
Let’s suppose that you did know the exact time. What would you change? Or, maybe better said, would you change? Curiousity can be just morbid, or it can prompt reform. An anticipated fearful event is NOT enough to prompt reform. Reform can only happen through our view of our lives, and our recognition of the gap between where we are and what Jesus asks of all mankind. But even then, the reform would be nothing more than a conforming to a plan laid out by someone else.
It is our relationship with Jesus, which sparks our feelings of love and affection to Him that can and will prompt the necessary reform. We cannot undo our past. We cannot remake our lives based on something that may happen in our lifetime. Our reform can only be brought about by our recognition of His love for us. His life, His teachings, and His death were all because of His love for us.
Padre Pio, in his writings-points out, “…Jesus did not measure the blood He shed for the salvation of humanity, could He possibly measure my sins in order to lose me? I do not believe so.”-2 Our awareness of the completeness of Christ’s love for us, only that is what will prompt us to change and reform our lives. His goodness and warmth that we feel and recognize will be the mechanism which will spur us to joyously follow Him. The end time is as important as what kind of washing machine we will buy next. His love is our life.
1- Mark 13,31-33
2- Secrets of a Soul, Padre Pio’s Letters to His Spiritual Directors
Do you believe in God?
Is this God all-good? Or all-bad? Or a little of each?
If He is all-bad, where did all the beauty in this world come from, and why would you believe in Him?
If He is sometimes good, and sometimes bad, how can He be God, who is always constant, and never capricious?
God must be all-good.
His plan, therefore, must also be good, because He is good.
Since we are here, we must be part of His good plan; and His plan for us must be good, as well.
Does God ever stop loving us, ever stop being aware of us? The answer must be no, since God is constant. He always loves us and is always aware of us.
Everything we receive, that which we like and don’t like is part of this all-good God’s plan for us. We just don’t know why these things happen! And, we don’t know where they will lead? This not knowing, however, if we let it, can erode our trust in God. We can wind up not trusting the very One, whose good plan for us permits these things to happen.
And so, we vainly replace our trust in God with trust in ourselves, our abilities, our thoughts, our desires. We, like Adam, seek to be our own little god. In abandoning our trust in God and substituting trust in our own judgments, we begin our own private hell. Always striving to trust something else, while not knowing who or what, like a fish on a boat deck, we flounder aimlessly trying to get back into the waters of belief.
Oh Lord, I believe. I want to believe. Help my unbelief.
What do we write...Right Now!
“The beauty of the moment”, “the music of now”… these are expressions that gently remind us to stop worrying about the past, to stop anticipating the future. The past is over. We can do nothing about it. We must move on. The things we worry about in the future exist only in our mind. They have not happened. Our fear portrays them as reality, when, in reality, they do not exist. God IS. He speaks to us in the now. He loves us in the now.
“Therefore I say to you, be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat, nor for your body, what you shall put on…Behold the birds of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns: and your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you of much more value than they?” (Matt, 5:25-26) Christ tells us again and again how much God loves us. But, for some reason, we find it difficult to grasp. We believe it, but we don’t trust it. We say to ourselves, “Yes, God does love me. But I am not a fool, I need to do this, or do that.” No, we don’t.
What we need to do is trust an all-loving God. We have to realize that if He created us, had us in His mind, you and me, from all eternity, then this all-loving God will not abandon us. Brennan Manning, in his book, “Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin’s Path to God” states, “But faith in God without hope in his promises is tainted trust.” You can spend the rest of your life focusing on that one sentence. His premise is that mankind does not really trust God. To accomplish that trust… we must be ruthless in our pursuit of it.
To worry about the past, the future, even about the condition of our spiritual life is to rob us of the here and now. It is in this moment that we honor and praise and love God. In the next one, too, and the one after that. How difficult this is. So much is stealing our attention, is forcing us to think of what was done yesterday, and what we have to do tomorrow. Right now…if you are meant to be reading this, then focus on what is being said. “What happens after this”, I don’t know. It is YOUR moment.
How do we implement this moment to moment living? It just means that the next person you meet is to be treated, no… is to be acknowledged that he/she is the most important person in your life, right then. He/she requires and expects your full attention and concern. But, what if he is dirty? What if he is white, black, red, brown? What if he doesn’t meet my expectations? Jesus is in him or her; does He meet your expectations?
What if it isn’t a person, I meet? What if something happens which I don’t like, I don’t want? How do I see the beauty of the moment, there? Ask God, “What do you want me to learn from this?” Each moment is given us, by a loving God. IT IS YOUR MOMENT!
What has a hold on us?
Yesterday, the last day in January, the Gospel reading (Mark 5:1-20) was about Jesus casting out the demons into the pigs that were nearby. However, this is not about the exorcism, but the person on whom this event centers.
After being freed of the demons that had plagued him, only naturally, the man, wanted to follow Jesus. Isn’t this a normal reaction? Having been freed of some life-long illness, some evil that we have struggled with all of our lives, wouldn’t we want to follow and praise the person who had healed us? But, Jesus told him “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.”
How many demons do you and I have? What sins devastate us? What illnesses wreak havoc with our bodies? What things persecute us and wear us down? From some of these demons, we may even have been freed. Somewhere, somehow we got the strength to overcome them. We may feel that we found a way, or we might believe that only through Jesus’ help were we able to overcome them. The emphasis is not on how we were healed, but that we were healed.
The joy of having a heavy burden lifted from us floods our souls. The tears of relief flow down our cheeks. We have been healed. We are being healed. Our resultant life has been changed for the better. Christ’s words ring in our ears, “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” Here is where our faith in Jesus, our trust in His love comes into play.
Sometimes, our problem is a result of our own negligence, our own willfulness, our own doing. But now, now we are out of the hole that engulfed us. We look around. We make sure nobody has noticed the cancer that has plagued us. We don’t want anyone to know of the shame that we have carried. Tell someone else? Let somebody know what problems I am, and have been struggling with? Why would I do that?
It has been said here, many times, that Christ loves us as we are. We are, right now, the results of everything that we have lived, and experienced. Someone with whom we see, or meet, we may even love them and they love us, someone is experiencing a problem similar to what we have struggled with. If we truly try to love the people that we come in contact with, then in that love we will say something of our own experience that will help them. We won’t know WHEN we are helping them, we won’t know HOW we are helping them, and so it is very important to love all that we meet. “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.”
Well, here we are, one week into 2011. Gifts received about two weeks ago, don’t seem quite as important as they did then. The joy and luster that shone from our eyes has dimmed a little. Resolutions that were firmly made have begun to slip a little. What is wrong? Why is this happening? Saint Augustine said it quite well in the beginning of his “Confessions”. He said, “Our hearts are restless, until they rest in Thee”.
We see something and we think, “…maybe this will make me happy”. And we go out and buy it. We hear others are happy because they do this or that. So internally, we think again, “…surely this will fill the void that I feel.” We try it also. We see people laughing and having a good time, so we imitate whatever they are doing. All of these are our attempts to feel good, to feel good about ourselves. They all seemed to be promising at first, but none delivered the hoped for relief, the desired well-being that we craved. And, once again, we feel that loneliness, that sinking feeling that we are missing something. That emptiness cries out, “…there must be more to life than this”.
Our hearts ARE truly restless, until we find the comfort, the relief, the calm that only Jesus can provide. Man’s ache that he feels inside, that craving to understand why he exists, why he is, that ache has been in man ever since he walked this earth. Some philosophers attribute that very craving as proof that there is a God. They contend that it would not exist, if there wasn’t something that would satisfy it. That craving can be thought of as existing in us because of God’s love for us. He put this in us to help us strive to find Him. Because of it, mankind continually seeks to make sense out of life and seeks to find what will make him happy.
In our search we experiment and try this and that. We look in every nook and cranny. It seems like everything that might possibly provide relief we try. All of this, just to find a reason for our existence, to find something that will fill the void within. Again, we hear the words, “Our hearts are restless, until they rest in Thee.” Only one thing will satisfy these needs within. To say that Jesus will provide the relief that we seek is not a complete answer though. Yes, we can recognize that His goodness and love will be the salve for our wounds. But it only becomes meaningful to us, when we bring Jesus into our hearts. With His goodness and love inside us, we finally feel the calm that has eluded us. Only until we crave the relationship that must exist between us and Him, only then can we say our hearts have found rest.
Whose Face Do You Put Here?
For the last three or four days, the phase “…the least of these…” has been running through my head. I know I just heard it somewhere, but I can’t remember where or when. I know that it is in reference to Jesus’ words about whatever we do for even the least of our brothers, we do to Him. So, I used the Concordance-1 to find the phrase in the Bible. There the king (Jesus) speaks to his subjects and tells them when he was hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or sick, or imprisoned they provided for his needs. And they asked him, when did we do this for you? His reply was, “…as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.”-2
The more I thought about this phrase, the more I was inclined to write about it here. Jesus cannot assert nor be any clearer on what we must do to follow Him. This one phrase sums up Christianity. If we really love Jesus, then we MUST love one another. He didn’t say it would be nice if we did. He didn’t say when we have the time to focus on someone else’s needs. He simply said, if we do these things for anyone else, we do them to Him. Not just kings, or our boss, or people we look up to, but we must be mindful and caring to everyone.
If this doesn’t thump our foreheads, and exclaim to us, “wake up”. Nothing does. He said, “I am the Way”. He is now pointing out the Way for us. I can write this, and you can read this, and we all can say, “yeah, ok” and continue to live our unchanging lives. We sometimes run around in circles, like a dog chasing his tail, trying to find out what we can be doing, to grow in our love for Christ. Well, He has told us. We can stop chasing our tails and start following His way of love. Love others as we love ourselves. Be mindful of others’ needs as we are mindful of our own.
When we see someone who causes us to tense up, to feel uneasy, (I am not talking about scared uneasy), to feel annoyance or disgust, we must realize we are looking at Jesus. If we start making excuses as to why it is right to tense up, to feel uneasy, to feel that annoyance or disgust then we are making excuses why it is ok to not love Christ.
To say this so bluntly, in such a matter-of-fact fashion is harsh. I know that, and so do you. We cannot expect to be perfect, nor arrive there any time in our lifetime. Perfection, sought by imperfect beings, is not possible. But small acts of kindness, of love, of concern, of awareness of other people’s needs, should be done by you and me. Maybe that sentence should read, “But small acts of kindness, of love, of concern, of awareness of everybody else’s needs, must be done by you and me.” We don’t have the luxury to pick and choose for whom we will care, or love. Jesus has the face of every person we meet and know.
So, there it is. We must love everybody. Do we start today? I doubt it very much. If we could love everybody, just by saying it, we would all be wearing haloes or there would be an “S” “t.” in front of our name. But, we can start trying today. We can start with just one person. When you reach the end of this article, close your eyes; think of the people who you find it difficult to get along with. Think about their lives, their suffering, and their problems. Realize that they are no different from you. They also have problems of which, you are totally unaware. See yourself in them. Don’t think of what you would do, if you were in their shoes. But rather, think of how you would feel, facing their problems. Would you be able to smile? Or Laugh? All of us are struggling in this world, while standing in holes that make it difficult for us to see out of. How good it is when someone extends their hand to assist a fellow human being out of their hole. See how the Christians love one another…
-1 http://www.drbo.org/
-2 Matt 25:40
