Tuesday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time
November 14, 2023
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/111423.cfm
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our readings share a common theme of “worthiness“.
In a passage familiar to us from the many funeral Masses we have attended in our lives, the Wisdom writer assures us that God will find us worthy if we are just:
But the souls of the just are in the hand of God,
Wisdom 3: 1-5
and no torment shall touch them.
They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead;
and their passing away was thought an affliction
and their going forth from us, utter destruction.
But they are in peace.
For if before observers, indeed, they be punished,
yet is their hope full of immortality;
Chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed,
because they have been tested
and found worthy by God.
The Wisdom writer seems to be so practical! He imagines life as a test, but one that God assures us we will pass if we live justly.
The word “just” comes from the Latin word meaning law, or right. To be just, in the sense of our first reading, is to be in alignment with the Divine Balance Who created us … to be “in the hand of God”.
But life does test our balance, doesn’t it! And if, by the poor use of our free will, we have climbed or tumbled out of God’s hand, the test can upend us.
Still, Wisdom instructs us that all is never lost. God loves us too much not to pick us up again into the palm of grace and mercy:
Those who trust in God shall understand truth,
Wisdom 3:9
and the faithful shall abide with God in love:
Because grace and mercy are with God’s holy ones,
God cares tenderly for us beloved.
In our Gospel reading from Luke, Jesus gives us some advice about how to keep that graceful balance which aligns us with God. He compares us to devoted servants who, so deep is their gratitude, cannot do enough for the master who loves them:
When you have done all you have been commanded, say,
Luke 17:10
‘We are unprofitable servants;
we have done what we were obliged to do.”
Indeed, as grateful creatures, we are obliged to love the God who deigned to create us. But the more we deepen in that love, the less it is an obligation. It becomes a delight, a reciprocal exchange, a sustaining source of the grace and mercy that justifies us.
Poetry: from Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood – William Wordsworth.
I cite only a section here. If you would like to read it in its beautiful context, click here. This poem is so worth your time!:
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore
Music: Inner Peace – Hennie Becker
Lavish Mercy 