Growing in True Faith: Assume Personal Responsibility for your Choices!

THE WORD IN LENT: Tuesday, 2nd week of Lent

March 2, 2021: Isaiah 1: 10, 16-20; Matthew 23: 1-12

 

There are innumerable non-Catholic friends and groups which pick up the lines of Jesus today, entirely out of its context and keep creating polemics out of it, unfortunately. ‘Do not call any one your Father or your Master here on earth” – what does that injunction actually mean?

 

Let no one be responsible for your judgments, your behaviours, your decisions and your choices! That is in crux what Jesus meant when he said, let no one be your ‘father’ or ‘master’ here on earth. For a Hebrew, father would mean that person who decides everything for you! You have nothing else to say, because the father's decision is final. The master is someone who holds a total authority over you; what he decides to be right has to be right for you; what he decides to be desirable has to be desirable for you! Let that not be your mode of decision making; allow no one make choices for you, says Jesus.  

 

The point is clear beyond confusions: a person will be responsible for one's own choices. It is no more the case that a person does something or decides on something and passes the blame on to someone else: his or her father, or generations before, or persons in authority. That may be an age-old practice; not for a true disciple of Christ, the Son of God.

 

Let each one take responsibility for his or her own choices, challenges the Word today. Your choices determine your destiny, apart from the all-pervading love that is God. It is this love that has invested us with such a great personal will and freedom, using which we are challenged to choose God and all that pertains to God.

 

Let us quit looking for scapegoats; isn’t it essential to assume personal responsibility for our choices. 

Growing in True Faith: Live by the Christ-Criterion

THE WORD IN LENT: Monday, 2nd week in Lent

March 01, 2021: Daniel 9: 4b-10; Luke 6: 36-38

As pastors many have this experience, as once a priest shared: “as it has happened many a times, I stepped out of the Sacristy after the Sunday Eucharist, and a person approached me and said: ‘Fr., thanks for the homily today! It was really beautiful, but I am afraid too difficult to practice!’ And I smiled at her reassuringly and said, ‘If I were to think of living my life anyway, with compromises, it would be much easier! But living a true and convinced Christian life is any day, difficult.’ She smiled, and bowed for a blessing!”

Is that not a very common experience, a very spontaneous thinking that many of us might have? That we can go easy on ourselves, and not demand too much from ourselves, to go with the flow and live in conformity to the society we find ourselves in? But conforming to the world or conforming to Christ…which is our real call?

"To live by the law you gave us", prays prophet Daniel today in the first reading! And Jesus gives us a criterion, to follow the law. Let what you expect from others for yourself be the criterion for your dealings with others! But the difficult part follows: Jesus says, let what you expect be the criterion but not what you actually get! You may or may not get what you expect, but you have an obligation to give the others what you expect from them! What you get in return - does that actually matter?

An apt day to pray with St. Francis of Assisi, 'Lord, grant that I may seek to understand than to be understood; to love than to be loved; to forgive than to be forgiven'. To give, give and to give, that is the Christ-Criterion!

Let us live by the Christ-criterion - that shall be the last renewal required of us!