Thursday,
November 23, 2017
33rd Week in
Ordinary Time
1st Reading:
1 Mac 2:15-29 Gospel:
Luke 19:41-44
When Jesus had come in sight of Jerusalem, he wept over it and said, “If only today you knew the ways of peace! But now your eyes are held from seeing. Yet days will come upon you when your enemies will surround you with barricades and shut you in and press on you from every side. And they will dash you to the ground and your children with you, and leave not a stone within you, for you did not recognize the time and the visitation of your God.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the
Assimilated Life
Experience)
Jesus wept over the aloof disposition of God’s chosen people. He wept not because he’d lose anything if he’d win none of them back to the Father. He wept because he knew they would not have peace outside the embrace of God’s love. “If only today you knew the ways of peace!” Jesus cried out.
Today, Jesus continues to weep because we do not know the ways of peace. One sure way of peace is remaining in God’s love. Outside God’s love, life is a “helter skelter”. At the social level alone, the absence of God’s love already triggers emotional and psychological tension. The following analogy illustrates the point.
Try this simple experiment on a well-tuned six-stringed guitar. With a finger of your left hand press the first bass string at the fifth fret and pluck it together with bass string number 2. Although you are only pressing the first string with your finger while leaving the second string to vibrate freely, both give a harmonious sound. You don’t get the same harmony on an out of tune guitar. What we’d get instead would be a discordant sound called dissonance. To cure the dissonance the musician adjusts the tension on both strings. The right tension results to harmony. The clue, in fact, of musicians that the guitar is already tuned properly is when the sound produced by the two strings plucked together is no longer dissonant.
In like manner, one has to accept his fair share of tension in order to live in peace in society. Tension is involved because people, by nature, think only of themselves, and personal interests could clash. To live harmoniously one must be altruistic by practicing the highest form of love, the kind that Jesus meant when he said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” The measure is “No greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friend”.
Such love is found only in God. We need to marinate ourselves in God’s love to manage the tensions of social life, and to persevere in loving the unlovable. We will then have peace, at least at the social level, and Jesus would shed lesser tears. – (Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., D.M.
May comment ka ba sa column ni Father Dan? May tanong ka ba sa kanya?
I-type ang BANDERA REACT
Disclaimer: The comments uploaded on this site do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of management and owner of Bandera. We reserve the right to exclude comments that we deem to be inconsistent with our editorial standards.