Reflection for 31st March 2023

 Friends, today we are presented two similar scenarios in both first and the Gospel reading. The first reading taken from the prophet Jeremiah 20:10-13 gives us the picture of vocational crisis of the prophet. In fact this is one of the chapters with a lot of laments and the laments come because of resistance to the message. The prophet had been preaching on how catastrophic the future would be because of their resistance to change, but nothing was happening, everything continued the same way and finally they did not want him at all! At the time he thought of giving up but he realized that he couldn’t. Thus he continues the prayer of lament which was very common in the Old Testament whenever things were not moving in better way.

The prophet realized that if God is “Deo Creante” he also is “Deo Elevante.” Therefore, there is no any other refuge than giving oneself to Him, so to unglue from God is to choose emptiness and this gives him a great confidence and trust in the Lord, despite all the hardships.

On the other hand, we find in the Gospel the rejection of the message of Christ because he affirms himself as Son of God. In the first verse of the Gospel we hear that they picked stones and wanted to stone him. To stone someone was a sentence of some few crimes in the Jewish context and this included blasphemy. But Jesus apologetically quotes Psalm 82:6, since they based their accusation on the scripture, to show them that they were ignorant of their own Scripture.  They were so fixated that they could not have space for the grace of God to enter.

Like prophet Jeremiah we can also find ourselves in a certain challenge that shakes our vocation either in our area of apostolate or anywhere. How are we going to deal with such challenges? Are we going to just give up? Jesus persevered all oppositions and was patient. He showed that he is a master and fulfilment of Scriptures. We too as Servants of the Word, are supposed to be masters of Scriptures! We are not supposed to get angry when someone challenges us in the matters of scripture. May God give as the necessary graces we need to persevere in our missionary vocation and to be truly servants of the word.

Geremias Armando Carlos

III Year Theology