Coffee With God

Reflection: Luke 9: 43-45

“The Son of Man will be handed over to men.” Last Sunday we have reflected on this verse, of course from the narration of St. Mark. Father Armellini had given a beautiful explanation for this. Jesus says he will be handed over to men. Who will hand him over? Who could have the power to hand over God to man? Do we think, Jesus was referring to Judas? Or would it be the work of the devil? No forces of evil could have any authority over God. It is God alone who could hand himself over to man. It is the beautiful image of love – God the lover throws himself into the hands of his beloved. A lover has no other way to express all the love than to throw himself or herself into the arms of a loved one. This is what God has done: he handed himself into the hands of people, knowing fully well that they would torture him and kill him. Do we not say that love is blind? When two teenagers fall in love, there could be a lot of opposing voices from the parents or the family. No matter how bad the obstacles are, the lovers are determined to overcome all that, because their love for each other is blind. In the Gospel today Jesus declares his love for the humanity – the God who is madly in love with humanity. Luke would also immediately point out that the disciples did not understand what he was saying. Can you imagine the pain of love that is rejected? God so loved that world that he gave his only son – but the world did not recognise him. Will we fall into the same trap of not recognising the love of God? In fact, Jesus was very specific on this requirement – that “Pay attention to what I am telling you.” Jesus calls on us to consider things on a deeper level, and actually think about the things that we don’t understand. He wants us to dig deeper and think about who we are and what the gospel means to us. Often, we are like the disciples here. We don’t understand and we “are afraid to ask” … because we do not want to hear things that are unpleasant to us.