April 1, 2019 Monday,
4th Week of Lent
1st Reading: Is 65:17–21
Gospel: Jn 4:43–54
In those days Jesus left Samaria for Galilee. Jesus himself said that no prophet is recognized in his own country. Yet the Galileans welcomed him when he arrived, because of all the things he had done in Jerusalem during the Festival and which they had seen. For they, too, had gone to the feast.Jesus went back to Cana of Galilee where he had changed the water into wine. At Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill, and when he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and asked him to come and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.Jesus said, “Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe!” The official said, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” And Jesus replied, “Go, your son is living.” The man had faith in the word that Jesus spoke to him and went his way. He was already going down the hilly road when his servants met him with this news, “Your son has recovered!” So he asked them at what hour the child had begun to recover and they said to him, “The fever left him yesterday in the afternoon about one o’clock.” And the father realized that it was the time when Jesus told him, “Your son is living.” And he became a believer, he and all his family. Jesus performed this second miraculous sign when he returned from Judea to Galilee.
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
Jesus was not impressed by the welcome put up by the Galileans because they were mushroom believers. Like mushrooms that sprout after a night of thunder and lightning, their belief in Jesus was the instant effect of the miracles they witnessed. Jesus rightly observed, “Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe!” St. Agustin said this in other words: ““Faith is to believe what you do not see.” Jesus’ statement was not without basis. The conversion of the whole family of the Capernaum official happened immediately after their child was miraculously healed.
Invasion of faith into a person’s belief system after a miracle partakes of the proverbial “cart-before-the-horse” irregularity. It is the horse that drives the cart, not the other way around. It is faith that provides dynamism to one’s relationship with God, not miracles. Just as mushrooms that sprout after a night of thunder and lightning die as soon as the scorching rays of the sun emerge, so relationship with God melts at the fading away of the extraordinary experience.
Wrote St. Augustine: “Faith is to believe what you do not yet see; the reward for this faith is to see what you believe.” – (Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., D.M.
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