The fear of "being good"

WORD 2day: Thursday, 29th week in Ordinary time

October 22, 2020: Ephesians 3: 14-21; Luke 12: 49-53 

Our call to belong to the family of that One Father who has created us all and called us all in the Son and in the Spirit, is basically a call to reflect God wherever we are! It consists of our intrinsic and integral goodness! Being good... people are afraid to be good these days! Fear of manipulation, exploitation and being taken for granted are so live and real that persons hesitate to be good and to hold on to what is good. In spite of this widespread experience that we have, the Word today gives us three reasons why we cannot afford to be afraid of being good: 

1. Because we take on our heredity from none less than the Almighty Lord: The Lord is our banner; the Lord is our identity, it is from the Lord we take our name, as a family of God. How can we be other than good? Being good has to be our very identity.

2. Because the Love of God is poured into our hearts: A love whose measure, we can never comprehend to the full  - the length and breadth and depth and height of it so immense that we cannot but be concerned about being worthy of that love; which entails that we are good in our very being! Being good is the real power that the Lord has entrusted us with, because we know the ultimate goodness in the entire reality: the Lord. 

3. Because we have a Vocation to be a Community of Counter Culture: Jesus commissions us to be the People of the Reign, which is to be a people of counter culture, proposing a culture that is opposed to the culture of social sin, the culture of injustice and exploitation, the culture of imbalanced growth and inhuman development, a culture of total human insensitivity. When we intend to be such a community of counter culture, the rest of the world may turn against us. 

Jesus makes it clear today: if you choose me, choose me absolutely!