Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children
Those grandiose and bullying scribes are back at it. They accuse Jesus of being possessed by Beelzebub, stating that the “prince of demons'' gave him the power to cast out demons. Even Jesus’s own family comes to fetch him, to get him home, declaring him “out of his mind.” Maybe some warm chicken soup and a long period of rest will help snap him out of his delusions.
But Jesus disallows neither synagogue officials or even his own kin to distract or deter Him. He further unsettles everybody by proclaiming that all sins, even blasphemy, punishable by death according to Mosaic law, can be forgiven. With one exception—blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
That’s a horse of another color.
Sinning against the Holy Spirit, the greatest blasphemy, is believing that God cannot or will not forgive. Our most sincere and tearful remorse is of little merit. Such a denial makes us Divinity, taking God’s rightful place as judge, rejecting and disallowing mercy for ourselves and others.
Many of us are extremely hard on ourselves. Full of shame, we expect that we should have known better, we should have done better, as if we could have been our own finished product from the get-go. This denies that we need life experiences, learning from mistakes and allowing God’s grace to mold and shape us into the best edition of ourselves. Failure is, after all, the greatest teacher. This takes a lifetime. God is patient with us but we’ll have none of it!
The sin against the Holy Spirit—God desiring to forgive, restore, and heal while we keep beating ourselves up, is essentially telling God to “butt out.”
We are imperfect. We are human. We are weak. We are fragile. We are incomplete. We fail. And this will always be the case, at least this side of the Pearly Gates. To not accept this truth is to deny our humanity. It is to take on a judging role that belongs to God alone.
Healing and restoring by grace is what God does. God relishes this. It’s God’s favorite thing to do, pursuing us and not letting go. Ought we deny our God such divine joy?
-Timothy J. Cronin
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Starting Jan. 31: THE PASSION NARRATIVES OF THE GOSPELS: AN ENCOUNTER WITH
THE CHRIST OF HOLY WEEK (Tim Cronin facilitator)
How can Holy Week 2023 be richer and more impactful? How can we encounter the most powerful part of the Bible more fully?
Our parish offers a Group Bible Study on The Passion Narratives of the Gospels TUESDAYS Jan. 31, Feb. 7, 14, 21, 28 @ 7-8:30PM in the chapel.
Pre Registration is encouraged: 937-252-9919 Our resource will be Father Raymond Brown’s A CRUCIFIED CHRIST IN HOLY WEEK : ESSAYS ON THE PASSION NARRATIVES (Available on Amazon @ $14.95)
Our author: Fr. Raymond E. Brown, SS., (1928-1998) authored more than 25 books on the Bible including his seminal works The Birth of the Messiah & The Death of the Messiah. Both are standard texts in Catholic & Mainline Protestant seminaries the world over. He was president of 3 of the most important biblical societies in the world. By appointment of Pope Paul VI & Pope John Paul II, he served on the Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission. Time Magazine has called him “probably the premier Catholic Scripture scholar in the U.S.”
Questions? This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 513-222-1200