YOU ARE IN THE SPIRIT

October 23, Saturday

TWENTY-NINTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

 

      Christians too, like anyone else, have to fight within themselves the tyranny of sin. They are torn beings, capable of the worst, yet capacitated for the best by the Spirit of Christ. They have to make Christ’s experience their own. We have to struggle to make the Spirit come to life in us and under his guidance and with his vitality seek the identity of Christ.

      We are sinners, deserving of punishment. But God is a patient God, willing to give new chances.

 

First Reading: Romans 8:1-11

With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.

The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.

Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.

But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!

 

Gospel: Luke 13:1-9

About that time some people came up and told him about the Galileans Pilate had killed while they were at worship, mixing their blood with the blood of the sacrifices on the altar. Jesus responded, “Do you think those murdered Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans? Not at all. Unless you turn to God, you, too, will die. And those eighteen in Jerusalem the other day, the ones crushed and killed when the Tower of Siloam collapsed and fell on them, do you think they were worse citizens than all other Jerusalemites? Not at all. Unless you turn to God, you, too, will die.”

Then he told them a story: “A man had an apple tree planted in his front yard. He came to it expecting to find apples, but there weren’t any. He said to his gardener, ‘What’s going on here? For three years now I’ve come to this tree expecting apples and not one apple have I found. Chop it down! Why waste good ground .

 

Prayer

Lord our God,
you enter our existence,
torn and divided as it is,
and with death written into it,
to set us free with the life of your Spirit.
May we give space to your Spirit
to work in us, to unify and renew
our being and our actions,
that with his help we may overcome
the forces of evil in us.
May we not be cut down like fruitless trees
but live for life and for love
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

 

Reflection:

Invincible patience of Jesus
A family that went through some tough times due to the illness of their child, found it all the more harder to go back to the Church. Not because they lost the faith, nor did they doubt the care and protection of God. On the other hand, the moments of pains and uncertainties strengthened their faith. But, they found it hard to answer the doubts of their fellow church members who were convinced that the illness of the child was a punishment from God for the sins of their parents or grandparents.
Today, the gospel invites us to reflect on whether or not our uncharitable and judgemental comments drive people away from the Church. To believe that the tragedies, illnesses and calamities in life are punishments from God for our sins, itself is a sin, because thereby we are believing in a wrong God. If tragedies or calamities were any yardstick to measure the curse of God, Jesus himself and all his apostles and all those thousands of martyrs must have been the most cursed people on earth! What horrifying deaths have they undergone.
Jesus invites us to believe in a forgiving and merciful God and not a punishing God. Unfortunately, even in our times, we do hear people talking about seeking forgiveness for the sins of our forefathers, to be saved from the punishments of God. But the Gospel invites us to reflect: What idea do we have of God? Isn’t that punishing, angry God just our projection, a god made to “our image and likeness”?
Jesus, on the contrary, invites us to change our hearts – to abandon compromises with evil, our hypocrisy — in order to take up the path of the Gospel. The Galileans who were killed by Pilate or those 18 people killed in the accident – the tragedy was indeed caused by the humans and not by God. But such tragedies should serve as reminders for those who are alive of the unpredictability of our life on earth and therefore, to be always prepared to face the inevitable death.
The Gospel is a message of comfort. Pope Francis says, this is a message that speaks of the patience of Christ, who waits like the gardener in the gospel, who pleads for another year of patience so that the tree might produce fruits. God’s patience always brings us the “year” of grace – this year of grace does not refer to 365 days, but the period of Christ’s ministry, the time of the Church before his glorious return, which is offered to us as occasions of repentance and salvation. The invincible patience of Jesus! Have you thought about the patience of God? Have you ever thought as well of his limitless concern for sinners? It’s never too late to convert. God’s patience awaits us until the last moment.

 

Video available on Youtube: Invincible patience of Jesus