6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Fr. Chinnappan Pelavendran
Trusting God is simply a belief in His Love and His Goodness. He has the power to help you, and He wants to help you. Christians are called believers, but many times, we are more like unbelieving believers. We trust our friends, the bank, the stock market, or the government more than we trust God and His Word. Lot of people go to church, hear what they should do and then go home and try to do it on their own. They usually end up desperately telling God how hard they’re trying to do what they need to do, and they’re leaving Him out! God wants us to put Him first in our lives. He wants us to put our confidence and trust in Him, all the time, in everything.
In the first reading, the Prophet Jeremiah explains the benefits of placing one’s trust in God rather than himself. Then he compares the wicked to a barren bush in a desert and the just to a well-watered tree growing near a running stream. In essence, this “beatitude” teaches us that if we choose God as our hope, our security, and our happiness, we will be blessed, truly happy. On the other hand, if we choose human standards for our guidance, self-sufficiency and the meeting of our own needs and desires as our happiness, we will find ourselves living in increasing misery and confusion, that is, in woe. Jeremiah tells us that the only source of lasting happiness is trust in God and hope in His promises.
In today’s second reading, St. Paul writes that trusting hope in the Resurrection of Jesus is the basis of our Faith. Through Jesus’ death and Resurrection, believers are now welcomed into a new relationship with God as His sons and daughters, and with each other as dear brothers and sisters who have Jesus as our Elder Brother and Redeemer. This means that all the blessings of the Beatitudes are now available to us, provided we choose to follow them.
In our Gospel today, Jesus did not say that poverty, or hunger, or sadness, or hatred is a blessing but these conditions of need and dependence make us rely on God. When we rely on God humans in relationship with God our creator. So the poverty, hunger, sadness, hatred, or whatever the cross can be an instrument to draw us closer to God. Whatever cross we have in our lives is there for a purpose, to bring us closer God. In that sense, our cross is also our blessing.
We have a long way to go to make it a reality. It is not God who is to be blamed; rather it is for all of us to hang our heads in shame. Jesus expects us to perform the same acts of goodness that he did for the poor, the alienated, the sick, the deprived, and the oppressed. Our trust should be in the Crucified and Risen Christ, the Savior and hope of the world. May we trust in God, not in human power, to lead us all into His kingdom and to keep us on His path.
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February 13, 2022 at 6:00 am |
Well said!