February 2019

When Jesus started out on His preaching career in the years before His trial and suffering, He gave people this strange teaching about love for enemies. It stops us in our tracks. Can it possibly be done? In little things we find it easy to forgive one another, to forgive those we love, but to be kind to our enemies seems to be beyond our abilities. Why should we be good to those who hate or hurts us? The answer is because the Lord is asking us to become something very different. We are being asked to become children of the living God. We cannot presume to be God’s children if we do not listen to what the Lord is asking us to do. God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. We are being asked to be like this, to be like God. We are not being asked to give in to others or to their wickedness. Remember Jesus and the man who struck Him in the face.

The Lord seeks for the sinner to repent, and for those who can, to help in the work of rehabilitation, of bringing a person back to life. For loved ones who have been wickedly hurt by the actions of others, the pain of loss can bring on the even worse suffering of unending hatred or deep depression. For example, so many lives are blighted by the loss of loved ones in car crashes. Some of these events are tragic accidents; but others are the result of human carelessness. By ourselves these traumas are too great for us to bear. We need God’s grace to help us cope with the evils that are done under the sun. We are not meant simply to let things go. In the end Jesus was put on a cross and prayed that people be forgiven because they do not understand the terrible things they do. A soldier listening nearby was moved to say, “in truth this man was a son of God.” Compassion is the power that heals. Do we have it?

The prophet Jeremiah helps us to see precisely this. The ones who think that human beings have all the answers to life’s questions will find in the end that what they believe will turn to dust. Everything they trusted to give them life will dry up like a desert stream. On the other hand, those who trust in God, and build their lives on God’s word, will find what looks like a dry and empty space, by human standards, will, in fact, be transformed. The same sort of contrast is made by Jesus in the Gospel. Those who have nothing are the heirs to the Kingdom of God; the hungry shall be satisfied; the sad will be filled with joy and laughter; the persecuted, those unwanted by the society of today, will enjoy the fullness of life in heaven.

In the desert that is our modern world, we need a lighthouse to help us to distinguish just what is true, what is the way God wants us to live. The truth is that all of us are invited to be part of the project of Jesus to bring light into the world. Jesus teaches us how to live by loving God with everything we have and by loving our neighbor as ourselves. The true success of our lives will lie in our becoming the person that God created us to be, and that person is an image of Jesus. At first sight, the desert seems to be dead. There are no signs of life. But when the rain does fall, when wells are dug, when gardens are planted and irrigated, suddenly the desert springs to life. Jesus calls us to be people of faith, people with a vision, people who are prepared to build lighthouses in the desert, from where His light can give a new vision of what humanity is meant to be.