Today’s gospel (Luke 10: 17-24) is full of little glimpses of Jesus in His Divine nature: how He watched Satan fall, how He gave power to the seventy-two disciples, how He relates to the Father, and how prophets and kings would have longed to see His day. The mysteries of the faith teach us to embrace the paradoxes that God’s revelation has shared with us: that God is one and three, that Jesus is man and God and that He died and rose.
At the heart of this gospel, however, is Jesus’ prayer of
thanks to the Father for revealing His truths to the little ones, the children.
Jesus does not aim to condemn cleverness but only the sense of power and
independence that it can give rise to. He does not mean to slight learning, but
only the self-aggrandizement that some learned people indulge in. Who then are
the children of this passage? They are the ones who surrender themselves to
Him: the ones who say ‘yes’ and echo His prayer of thanks. Mary, Mother of God,
is the first of these. We are all called to follow in her wake.
When the COLW Book of Life invites us to be the anawim
of the Lord, it is inviting us to this attitude of being children before the Lord,
beggars of His grace who hope that in His mercy He will reveal to us the mysteries
of the Father. When we desire to make this surrender, it is no doubt because He
has been there before us, clearing the obstacles that prevent us, and smoothing
the path for our small steps. When He invites us to do some of the clearing
work, we find ourselves subjected to the ‘Father’s forming action’. That said,
the greatest thing we can aspire to accomplish by that grace is to surrender
ourselves to Him, begging every day for our names to be written in heaven like the names of the
seventy-two.
We are so poor – so poor, says the French writer Fabrice
Hadjadj, that we must even sometimes beg a voice with which to offer up prayers. In such a moment, however, it is worth remembering that even while we hate our sins, grace does not mean hating ourselves; it means forgetting ourselves. Even if we suddenly have power over the devils, therefore, we cannot
rejoice in our competence but rather in our dependence on Him.
Thank you Brian!
ReplyDeleteLearning to surrender is such a difficult thing to do initially when you begin your journey with God. I find that reminding myself that God is I charge and despite my fre will, He always knows better and loves me. In the last 3-4 years I have discovered the "Father's forming action" in my every day life and praying "Jesus I trust in you" when I struggle. Every year, on 01/01, I choose a word for the coming year and try to focus on that word. The COLW community has been instrumental in practicing more and more the "surrender" word and I feel, despite the evil temptations and events, that God holds me and shows me a clearer way in His Will when I surrender to his forming action. God bless you all.
Thanks be to God.
DeleteIt is difficult to know how to be sometimes.It’s so easy to panic and try and solve the problems ourselves, and make a bigger problem. It goes against human instincts to let something unfold and see what happens. We are taught to rely on logic and learning from other sources. But God repeatedly says do not worry.
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