A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 9: 46-50) sees another pair of admonitions
from Jesus to his disciples. The second of these – anyone who is not against
you is for you – is a warning not to give too tribal a tone to their discipleship.
When the seed of God is observed, let it be encouraged, rather than repressed; curation and stewardship are not simply about control.
It is perhaps a warning for the disciples not to stifle the gifts of the
Spirit, wherever they happen to be found. It is something of a paradox, nevertheless,
for Jesus will say what appears to be the opposite in Matthew 12: 30: He who
is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.
The latter is as much to say that nobody can claim the gifts of the Spirit in
opposition to Jesus. While the Spirit roves widely, He is ultimately the breath
of the Father and the Son, not the purveyor of a different brand of Jesus-less
holiness. The Holy Spirit bestows His gifts where He wills, but Jesus is the
way, for Jesus is the path to God.
And yet this centrality of Jesus as Saviour (as we noted on
Friday, His active vocation) is married to what we could consider His personal
vocation of being the little Child before the Father. Again, this is only a
vocation in a broad sense that pertains to Jesus in His human nature. For the
disciples to welcome the little child in the name of Jesus was to recognise the
mystery of Jesus’ personal relationship to the Father. This is why the
disciples’ competitive jostling was so wrong. They imagined that coming close
to God meant assuming some powerful position. They failed thus to see that divine
election was not promotion, quite the contrary!
No wonder then that Jesus could pray alone in the midst of His
disciples, as we noted on Friday. They were physically present to Him, but they
had far from understood the path He was on: a path of surrender to the Father
upon whom He gazed continually in the depths of His soul where the Beatific
Vision accompanied Him. Who then is the least among them? It is Jesus of
course – least in the sense that the deepest meaning of His incarnation,
perhaps Jesus’ personal vocation, was His sonship through which He was, as it
were, a little child before the Eternal Father, providing the model by which
all adopted sons and daughters of the Lord might live. The human instinct for
power assumes that kinship with the king signifies firstly princedom. The Divine
Wisdom tells us here that kinship with the King of the Universe signifies
firstly filiation, dependence, intimacy, surrender, tender love. The deeper the
dependence, the intimacy, the surrender, the more tender the love, the more the
disciple approaches to the model of all divine childhood: Jesus, our Saviour.
Common usage suggests that all humans are children of God,
but this is not quite true. All humans are creatures of God and all are called
to become His children, but it is only through Jesus the Way, that this
filiation of tender, intimate surrender to our Eternal Father becomes a reality.
He alone can make us pleasing to the Eternal Father. He alone can make us akin
to the child who stood in the midst of the disciples and was chosen by the Son
of God Himself to symbolise the blessed and exalted destiny of those who are
ready to cast themselves by His grace into the arms of the One who awaits their
homecoming.
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