Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
August 2, 2024
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080224.cfm
Jesus came to his native place and taught the people in their synagogue.
They were astonished and said,
“Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds?
Is he not the carpenter’s son?
Is not his mother named Mary
and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?
Are not his sisters all with us?
Where did this man get all this?”
And they took offense at him.
But Jesus said to them,
“A prophet is not without honor except in his native place
and in his own house.”
And he did not work many mighty deeds there
because of their lack of faith.
Matthew 13:54-58
Today’s readings are painful and sad. Both Jeremiah and Jesus were outcast for trying to inform and help their own people. And the people suffered because of their hardness of heart.
Why do people resist the message of mercy and redemption? Walter Brueggemann says that “a prophet is someone that tries to articulate the world as though God were really active in the world.”
If one’s heart is too hard to trust and respond to God’s activity in the world, the words of the prophets are lost on them.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
We pray that by informing our hearts with the Gospel, we may respond to God’s continuing call for our transformation.
Poetry: The opening lines from “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran
(The Prophet), the chosen and the beloved,
who was a dawn unto his own day,
had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese
for his ship that was to return and bear him back
to the isle of his birth.
And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool,
the month of reaping,
he climbed the hill without the city walls and looked seaward;
and he beheld his ship coming with the mist.
Then the gates of his heart were flung open,
and his joy flew far over the sea.
And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul.
But as he descended the hill,
a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart:
How shall I go in peace and without sorrow?
Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.
Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls,
and long were the nights of aloneness;
and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?
Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets,
and too many are the children of my longing
that walk naked among these hills,
and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.
It is not a garment I cast off this day,
but a skin that I tear with my own hands.
Nor is it a thought I leave behind me,
but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst.
Yet I cannot tarry longer.
The sea that calls all things unto her calls me,
and I must embark.
For to stay, though the hours burn in the night,
is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould.
Fain would I take with me all that is here. But how shall I?
A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings.
Alone must it seek the ether.
And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.
Music: Sounds of Silence – Simon and Garfunkel
Lavish Mercy 