The Godless and the Thoughtless!

THE WORD IN LENT

Friday, 4th week in Lent - April 1, 2022
Wisdom 2:1,12-22; John 7: 1-2, 10, 25-30

Enduring all odds is a necessary quality for a servant of God. If only a person wants to remain faithful to what the Lord has called him or her for, the person has to grow tough from within. One cannot allow something to affect him or her so easily, if the person wants to go all the way with one's vocation, the call to be a minister of God, or a person of God, or simply to be a child of God.

Endurance means the capacity to dedicate oneself for a cause and to stand by that cause come what may. Here we are speaking of the Lord's chosen ones and their capacity for total dedication. There are two types of situations that can make one lose one's endurance: the opposition of the Godless and the indifference of the thoughtless.

The Godless interpret everything that you do in their own sense and malign your name and whatever you are upto. The first reading says, their malice makes them blind to anything that is godly. They are those who confuse the everyday failures of the human beings with the eternal nature of God... they cannot look beyond what is happening here and now and they get lost in making their present moment as pleasing to themselves as possible, that they lose a holsitic vision of life. 

The thoughtless are the so called 'religiously diligent' people but who are lost in their own world, who wish that everyone fits into their framework of understanding; they try to fit even God into their own framekwork. Jesus is struggling against these in the Gospel today.

We may be faced with the Godless who oppose us, malign us, persecute us...are we going to give up being messengers of the Lord? We may be surrounded by the self righteous lot who find fault merely because we do not fit into their frameworks...are we going to lose heart? If we are broken because of these experiences, that would be a fragrant offering we can give the Lord but we need to endure! The worst of everything is if we ourselves fall into one of the two categories - the godless or the thoughtless. Let us beware! Let nothing disturb us and let us never be weary of doing good (2 Thes 3:13).