Life as a Christian can often confound our expectations. Things do not always turn out the way we might hope or think. Yet through it all, God remains faithful. Fr Richard reflects on today’s readings from Mass.
Readings for Friday of the 9th week of ordinary time (memorial of St Boniface) can be found here.
Anyone who has ever organised a church event knows the feeling. You spend weeks planning, you publicise it until you’re blue in the face, you have high hopes it will be a success … and three people turn up. Alternatively, you arrange something you think will be low-key and suddenly the place is packed out. You’re left scratching your head trying to make sense of it all. Life, as we all know, has a habit of confounding our expectations.
Many people in the time of Jesus thought they knew what sort of figure the Messiah would be. The Messiah was often referred to as “the son of David”, and the expectation was that he would be a leader like King David, a warrior-type king who would bring freedom to Israel by driving out the Romans. That, of course, was very far from the kind of Messiah Jesus turned out to be. And so, in today’s Gospel, he challenges peoples’ ideas. He quotes Psalm 110 to show that the Messiah is in fact David’s Lord, not his son, and so will be greater in every way than David, rather than a carbon copy of him. From that point on, people had to rethink their ideas of who the Messiah would be and what he would do. Paul reminds Timothy that things do not always work out the way you might expect. Those who do good end up being persecuted, as Paul himself was, while evil people seem to go along quite unhindered. Yet Paul encourages his friend to remain steadfast in all the twists and turns of life, for Jesus will remain faithful to him.
Sometimes we might expect events to unfold in a certain way. We might think we know which events or initiatives will succeed or fail. We might expect life to proceed down a certain path, and then something happens which throws all our plans into disarray. The Christian life is not about everything unfolding according to a well ordered plan, nice as that might be sometimes! It’s often messy, unpredictable, and haphazard. Yet through all of that, we can trust that God’s purposes can be fulfilled even in chaos, for whatever else happens, he is always with us, and is always ready to surprise us.
Mass today is in St Saviour’s at 10am.
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