CHOOSING GOD'S WAYS

Reviving our Choice for God's ways

18th February, 2018 - 1st Sunday in Lent
Gen 9: 8-15; 1 Pet 3: 18-22; Mk 1: 12-15

For the past three days the Word has been speaking to us of reviving our choices, for life, for joy and for God, choices so essential for our Christian life. Today the readings sum up the list by inviting us to seek the ways of God as a whole! We have heard reports of people being burnt, slain, beaten, and beheaded for the sake of their faith! Even recently we have seen clips circulated of people being threatened for having distributed pamphlets expressing their faith. What was in the pamphlet? How offensive was that?...to those questions I have no answer. But one thing we know, it takes a great courage to get into tasks such as these! 

Accepting God's ways is not an easy task. When things go well, it is fine! Miracles and great favours are also God's ways. But when it comes to accepting suffering, accepting struggles from the hands of God...the challenge is enormous. It doubles, when we do not really know why we are going through what we are facing and what we are moving towards. We have three imageries for us to understand that anxiety, and still submit to the Lord.

1. Noah's Ark: That is the imagery of a work which seems meaningless and crazy - building an ark on an arid ground! There is a forewarning of something and Noah chooses to act on God's directions. Meaninglessness and Fruitlessness of his activity does not bother him! 

2. The Desert of Temptation: Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the desert, says the Gospel passage we read today. Desert, wilderness, impending temptations, frightening dangers...nothing stops Jesus from walking in God's ways. He knows for sure, that God has appointed God's angels to protect him and keep him from stumbling on the stone that is not within God's design. A perfect submission to the Lord.

3. The Passion of Christ: We are about to reflect a lot these days, and prepare ourselves to behold in its gravity the passion that Lord Jesus went through for the sake of God's love for humanity. It seemed to Jesus, at times even to us, that it was an over-doing on God's part. Yes it was! Because, it is the very nature of God's love to over do. Everything is given to us in abundance. And the passion, seemed to lead Jesus into such an obscurity. But he did not resist submitting to that design and that is why we had that invincible light at the end of the tunnel, the single point of our hope: Resurrection.

The call is clear: to choose God's ways. In spite of the struggles that exist in it, we are called to lovingly submit to God's ways and that would be the only sure way to our salvation.