Tuesday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Today's gospel (Luke 7:11-17) offers us a miracle story: Jesus raises a man from the dead, and the crowd stands amazed. This miracle made the onlookers (and hopefully we ourselves) ponder the sheer mystery of Jesus, the God who has come to earth to be among us. But what I am focused on especially is the reason why Jesus is moved to perform this miracle: he is responding to the mother's deep grief. How amazing and mysterious it is that The Lord of all creation focuses on this particular mother and makes himself part of her life.
It does not (and should not!) take a miracle in the strict sense of the word for us to be confronted with the sheer mystery of our faith and see how God is constantly wanting to invite us into that mystery. Last Sunday morning, I was meditating with the 1st and 2nd graders about the Bible. "How old is the Bible?" one of the children asked. We looked on the copyright page and noted that that particular Bible had been printed in 1970, but then we went on to discuss how many parts of the Bible have been around for 3000 or 4000 years. The children were amazed - wow, that long! God has been speaking to us for that long! (Little do they know that God has been loving us and relating to us for even much longer than that! They'll be hearing about the whole History of Salvation in a couple weeks....)
The children's amazement became my own. How amazing and mysterious it is that our faith has been handed down one by one, down through the centuries, to people who speak many different languages and come from many different walks of life. How many many generations of people have been baptizing and offering the Eucharist to each other? In all of it, God is there. Just as God responds to people like the widow, God responds to each one of us, however great or small we are.
Pondering all the ways in which this mystery of God has been handed down through the centuries by us - the community, the church - is what struck me as I read today's first reading (1 Timothy 3:1-13). Paul describes the qualities of various leaders in the church. For deacons, for example, he says they should not be deceitful, nor seek personal gain, but should be "holding fast to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience."
We name that mystery each week: "We proclaim your death O Lord, and profess your resurrection, until you come again!" The point Paul makes is that for the believer, these are not mere words - this mystery is something we seek to live each day in how we treat each other and ourselves. To believe that death leads to new life is counter-cultural; we have to live in ways that demonstrate we believe that Jesus' new life takes over even our own death. And there are people who do that in all kinds of ways, from giving up all their possessions, to being radically hospitable.
On the other hand, if we proclaim Jesus' death and resurrection merely because we want others to think well of us, or because we want positions of power (like being a bishop or a deacon), then the mystery of the faith is lost. When we seek our own gain, we are just replicating what our culture already tells us - there is no life after death, there is only whatever money and power you can get for yourself now, so get it while you can!
Today, let us aim to be true witnesses of Jesus' life, death and resurrection, no matter how great or small we are.
-Jana M. Bennett