Listening to grow - openness and Godliness

WORD 2day: Friday, 2nd week in Easter time

May 2, 2025 -  Acts 5: 27-33; John 3: 31-36

pc: Cecilia Paredes

We are reflecting on the charachteristic traits of the first Christian community that grew directly out of the Resurrection experience, offering itself to us as an example and challenge for us to realise our call to be Easter people, or the People of the Ressurection. 

The message that we have today comes from an indirect source, from a Jewish Rabbi Gamaliel, a learned man and seemingly an authentic person of God. Although he does not speak directly about the people but about Jesus, he presents to us a very pertinent reflection to understand a crucial trait of the people, of the first Christians. He instructs his own Jewish colleagues not to worry too much about destroying the movement initiated by Christ, saying it would die by itself if it were not founded on truth. The corollary is what matters to us - if the movement has not died, it is clear that our faith is founded on the truth of Resurrection. 

The lesson not to close their minds to the possibility of truth in the faith of the new grouped people, is a lesson to us too: not to close our minds to anyone around us who wishes in all his or her sincerity to share one's own experience and conviction. The Lord may speak to us through the person. When we are open and listening, we shall see a God-given scope to grow... just as the few loaves of bread multiplied themselves into a great feast for a great number, just as a handful who believed in Christ multiplied into a vast community of faith that would change the face of the earth very soon!

Listening to the Lord from any corner of our times, is an important trait of the people of God... that openness amounts to Godliness and a real experience of growth and fullness!