Reflections of Caritas

Dear friends,

In this week’s Gospel Matthew offers a very contrary picture to the one we had last week. Last week Jesus gave Peter the “keys of the kingdom”. This week Jesus says to Peter “Get behind me Satan!” The same Peter, who recognized and confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, had a popular Jewish belief that the expected Messiah would bring instant glory to Israel in terms of military success, wealth and prosperity. Peter had not yet grasped God’s ways and Christ rebuked him for being an obstacle to his mission. This shows that even though Peter professed that Christ is the Messiah (as God revealed it to him) he had not fully understood the nature of Christ’s mission.

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THE 19 TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR A

Dear friends,

In this Gospel passage, Jesus is once again alone and taking time to pray and he essentially tells
the disciples that He will meet them on the other side of the Sea of Galilee.  So the disciples are in the boat, they are on their own and they are maybe half way across, a few miles out. In this dark part of the night, they are facing opposition, not from human enemies, but from nature. The wind picks up and it is against the boat. It is looking very dangerous!

In that dark part of the night, when nature is in her full fury, they see Jesus. He is not performing a trick on the water but He is coming towards them while walking on the water. This is Jesus coming to them with His presence on these waters. And remember that the waters are not calm, the storm is whipping up a chaos and it is in this chaos that Our Lord and Saviour makes Himself manifest. And the disciples are of course, as each of us would be, terrified and they cry out in fear. Immediately, Jesus does not let them to remain in anxiety. He quickly says, “Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid”. Jesus reassures them and their faith strengthens.

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THE SIXTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 

GOSPEL: Matthew 13: 24-43

Dear friends,

We encounter today a parable that answers one of the most basic and perplexing questions people can have about God’s kingdom; If the kingdom of heaven has indeed come, why is evil still present? In fact, why does it seem that evil is stronger than ever? Or why does God let bad things happen to good people?

That was a very practical question for the disciples. After all, if the kingdom of heaven had indeed come and had begun to spread upon the earth, why was it that Jesus was meeting with such great opposition from the Jewish religious leaders? Why were they plotting to kill Him? Why was there so much resistance to Him as “King”?

Like the disciples, the servants in the parable are very inquisitive, they put forward to their master an important question; “Where, then, did these weeds come from?” There is an urgency to their question. They want to know what happened and who is responsible. So do we. That’s what we want to know when we discover weeds in our fields. We want an explanation and someone we can blame, hold accountable, and even punish. Far too often we see that in our day to day life situations and opinions. Jesus, however, seems less interested in this approach than we are. He doesn’t give it much time or attention.

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Dear friends,

We don’t have to look too far to see that there are so many people in our world today suffering. Every day there are countless victims of random and senseless acts of shame and hatred. Many are dying and suffering because of poverty, ignorance, famine and drought. Sadly these situations are now a feature of our world today. But in our own daily lives, each of us experiences pain, difficulty and suffering. This comes in many forms; Covid-19, ill-health, bad news from the doctor, long term unemployment, a long standing family problem and many other seemingly ordinary experiences we each have every day. There are also other kinds of burdens we face, burdens of sin, or temptation, burden of guilt, burdens of conflicting loyalties, burdens of providing for our families, this life is filled with stress, with cares, with worries, with situations that call for us to make choices that sometimes are not pleasant to make. We can often believe or assume that we can or should be able to cope on our own when we experience these or similar difficulties. This is a mistake. We don’t have to cope on our own and more importantly we can’t.

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