Tuesday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
January 14, 2020
Today, in Mercy, our readings demonstrate God’s power to change human lives.
Our first reading from the Book of Samuel completes the story of Hannah, Samuel’s mother. Hannah, one of the two wives of Elkanah, was childless. In today’s passage, Hannah takes her grief to the Temple and places it before the Lord. God hears her prayer and she conceives her son.
When the story is summarized, as I have just done, it seems like a cookie-cutter miracle story. A skeptic might wonder, had she waited long enough, would Hannah have conceived – Temple or not.
That’s because the summary has drained out all the human angst, emotional roller-coastering, denial, and frustration that finally brought Hannah to God’s arms. It could have taken her so many others places. Unrelieved pain often does. It takes some into unresolved anger, depression, addiction, even suicide.
The miracle of this story is Hannah’s faith and the power of God’s love in her. It just so happens that there was also Samuel.
Mark, in these early chapters of his Gospel, presents Jesus as the personification of that Divine Power. Both Christ’s “astonishing “ teaching and his stunning authority over evil convince us of this power.
With Jesus, the believer’s reality is transformed by faith and grace. Divine life blossoms even in formerly barren circumstances. Wholeness emerges even from that which had seemed fragmented.
This is the miracle: there is Divine Life inside that we had not seen until we looked, by faith, with the God’s eyes.
Music: Everyday Miracles – Sarah Grove
