“As the Lord spoke to me, the spirit entered into me.” This is true for the prophets in a special charismatic way, but this is true for all those who have faith. Whenever we listen to the Word of God with faith, it is the Spirit Himself who enlivens us and causes us to know God from within. The Word of God, the word of the sacred scriptures, is so important, that I’m tempted to preach always and only on that for the rest of my life. The experience of God’s living Word was at the beginning of my own conversion and what inspired me to give my life for the Gospel. You have to have stopped at least once in your life to consider what exactly faith is. Commonly, when we say that we believe, we mean that we espouse a certain opinion – we think something is true, we think that God exists, or we think that Jesus is our Savior. While those are things that we believe as Christians, an act of faith is something much more focused. Faith is a special ability that we have from our baptism. It is the ability to listen and hear the Word of God, the Bible, the sacred scriptures, as coming from God. St. Augustine reminds us that the voice of the Holy Scriptures is the Holy Spirit. When we listen with faith, we are listening for the voice of the one speaking, the Holy Spirit, “As the Lord spoke to me, the spirit entered into me.”
Wednesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel ends with a tragic request. The whole town of the Gadarenes come out to see what Jesus has done and they beg him to leave. From a worldly perspective, it is wasteful to have an entire herd of swine drown. We could speculate that Jesus could have found a less wasteful way of getting rid of the demons that were possessing those two men. Jesus is not obliged to do what the demons tell him to do after all. Certainly, liberating these two men from the influence of evil spirits was not only good for them, it would also have been good for the townspeople who were unable to travel by the road because of how savage the possessed men were.
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Christians must recall death frequently. They must recall the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, they must recall those who have passed before us, prayerfully interceding for them, and they must recall their own mortality. This is not because they are morbid, but because death is at the heart of all drama: human and Christological. Christians, however, do not have the same perspective on death – faith is the power to see death as God sees it. It is a challenge to remain in that perspective, however, because we are constantly tempted to consider our current lot in life permanent. The truth about our lives, that our life in this world is temporary, can be liberating and healing. As we attach ourselves to Jesus in faith – especially when it is challenging or involves suffering – it is actually a way for us to begin our healing from death. When we no longer have any reason to hope as human beings because all possible solutions have been exhausted, as in the case of the woman in today’s Gospel, we must still hope in God. With that act of hope, as through the crucible, our hearts experience divine healing from this present world that is passing away. That’s a very different perspective.