Tuesday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
I would love to see a comparison between how much time Jesus spends teaching people and how much time he spends warning people about what will happen if they don’t follow his teachings. I feel like I am constantly reading another warning about what happens if I don’t repent. Maybe God is trying to tell me something…
In today’s Gospel, Jesus scolds the towns where he has done most of his “mighty deeds”. His message is clear: Jesus doesn’t perform miracles for show, he performs them that those who see them might pay attention and believe what He is saying. Jesus expresses pity on the cities that have not repented and declares that living through the events of Sodom and Gomorrah will be preferable to what will happen to those who fail to repent on the day of judgement. To make a massive understatement, Jesus is pretty upset that He’s done all these things and people aren’t listening to Him.
In my own life, I’ve been thinking a lot about how important these big, life changing moments are to our faith journeys. We live in a world where hundreds of things vie for our attention every day, and it’s easy to miss when God is calling to us, as He doesn’t tend to be as “shiny” as everything else. We usually find God in a “still, small voice,” but sometimes, to borrow a favorite expression from my mother, God speaks to us “with the subtlety of a falling jackhammer.” Often, we need those momentous occasions to remind us of who God is and what God can do. Those events and moments in our lives serve the same purpose as Jesus’ miracles during his ministry. They are used to get our attention, and to call us deeper into relationship with God. But like Chorazin and Bethsaida, it is easy for us to treat them as one-off events, and then we go back to our lives as they were before, completely unchanged except now we have a cool story we can tell. These moments are meant for so much more, and if we don’t let them change us, we’re missing the point of why God does them in the first place.
Today, let us remember the mighty deeds Jesus has performed for us, and let us remember that those deeds are not just for show, but are a call to repent and follow Him!
-Mary Bagatti