Saturday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
I have the wonderful opportunity to accompany 50 pre-med and pre-dental students on a medical service trip to Panama in January. As part of the class they take to prepare for our trip, we are discussing the importance of reflection and the need for inner work to be done to bring our best selves to those we will work with while on our trip. Today’s gospel reminds us that it is essential for us to spend time and effort focusing on our own flaws and gifts instead of noticing only the errors of others. We need to “cultivate” our own ground in order to be fertile soil for Christ to grow in our lives.
In today’s gospel passage, people speak to Jesus about the Galileans that had been killed. Jesus recognizes that the people telling this story are convinced that the Galileans who died these gruesome deaths had committed greater sins. Jesus turns the table on these individuals to remind them that every person has sins and is in need of repentance. The word “repentance” in Greek is “metanoia” which means to turn towards God. Another literal translation of “metanoia” is to “perceive afterwards.” It is almost as if you are so aware of your thoughts and actions that you can see their consequences before they actually occur. With this mindset of repentance, we can become so in tune with our thoughts, actions, and speech that we allow Christ to guide us, and we become expressions of God’s presence. The transformation that occurs as we repent is saturated with God’s grace. Just as Jesus describes in the gospel, God chooses to “cultivate and fertilize” the ground around us to help us bear fruit. God calls us to repentance, but it is God’s love and mercy that leads us to Him.
What does repentance mean for us today, and how does reflection help nurture this change? There are many definitions for reflection, but most of them include looking at your own views, ideas, prejudices, and actions and examining them in light of a certain criteria. For us as Christians, Jesus would be the foundation for how we examine our lives. This process of reflection requires humility and openness, since there will be many times that we recognize how we fall short of living in the image of Christ. Hopefully, when we reflect on our lives prayerfully we can see how our feelings, prejudices, and values affect our actions. To repent, we need to begin from within and know where we are in order to understand where we need to head. Through our time spent reflecting, our hope will be that we will begin to see more clearly God’s role in our life and how we can allow God to more fully live with and in us. This process of reflection is dependent on the Spirit for our transformation. We choose to take the time and effort to spend reflecting with God, but God supplies the grace for the “metanoia” to occur. These changes in who we are and how we live are vital for how we carry out our mission as disciples. If we do not do the inner work necessary to become more like Christ, we will be unable to bring Christ to the world in which we live.
As part of our preparations for our service trip, I shared the following quote from Thomas Merton regarding the importance of reflection and transformation. “Those of us who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. We will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressivity, our ego-centered ambitions, our delusions about ends and means.”
Jesus calls each of us to inner reflection. He accompanies us on this journey, and He shows us how to imitate Him. While preparing this reflection, I realized that the word “reflection” has another meaning- to be the image of what one sees in a glass or mirror. Through prayer and transformation (and God’s grace) we in fact become a “reflection” of God. I believe that this world is filled with “people that longs to see your face.” May we be the Face of God for all to see.
Loving Father, Your Son Jesus calls us to follow Him through lives of love and service. Send down Your Spirit so we may be transformed and become like you in our thoughts, words and deeds. May our lives give you glory. We pray this in Christ our LORD. Amen
Marylynn Herchline