Coffee With God

Reflection: Luke 11:14-23

In the day’s liturgy, the Church wants each one of us to examine our conscience on our faithfulness to the Lord. Faithfulness to the Lord is not about attending Sunday Masses. It is about being aware of not allowing ourselves to be stubborn and deaf, shutting the Lord out and doing what we want. When Jesus performed miracles and healed the sick, the stubborn Jewish leadership said it was through the power of Beelzebub, the leader of demons. A person with a hardened heart is unhappy with the Church, the faith in the Lord, and puts God aside with an excuse and discredits, slanders God. Pope Francis explains the passage and says, “One cannot be with Jesus and be at a distance. Either you are with Jesus or you are against Jesus; either you are faithful or you are unfaithful; either you have an obedient heart or you have lost your fidelity.” Our hearts may be as hard as stone, many times we may have discredited and disobeyed the Lord, but there is still time. This is the time of mercy of the Lord: let us open our hearts because he is in us. Jesus says, the Satan is strong, but the one who comes in is stronger – that is Jesus himself. He is mightier than all the evil powers and the ultimate victory shall be with him. In his parable, Jesus is suggesting that he is engaged in a spiritual warfare with the Satan. Saint Paul expressed similar feelings in his letter to the Romans: ‘Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more’. The evil one stares on our face every day in our moments of sinfulness, and we are so prone to our weak behaviours. Yet, the promise of Jesus is a huge consolation – that there is a greater power – the power of God, the power of the Holy Spirit. The devil cannot win and the ultimate victory belongs to God. We are sometimes blind to the hand of God working in us. We fail to appreciate the good that people do; Have you come across people who say, “by sheer luck, I escaped this accident” or “It was coincidence that there was a doctor available, so that the patient could be attended to in time”? When we recognise only the “luck”, or “chances” or “coincidences”, we fail to acknowledge the hand of God, in those circumstances and places. There is nothing that happens by chance or by coincidence. And there is nothing called “luck” in the life of a believer. The Word of God poses this question for our reflection: Are we grateful enough to acknowledge the miracles that the hand of God works in our lives or do we take them for granted?