Life can sometimes feel like continually going up and down an escalator. Jesus invites us to step off and encounter him. Fr Richard reflects on today’s readings from Mass.
Readings for Thursday of week 25 of ordinary time can be found here.
Imagine someone who has never seen an escalator before. They walk into a department store and see these strange moving steps. They watch other people standing on them, so they decide to give it a try. They step on at the bottom soon they arrive on the next floor. “This is amazing!”, they say to themselves. So they turn around, get on the down escalator, and return to the ground floor. Then they go up again. And down again. Up and down, up and down. Eventually someone asks them, “What are you doing?” They reply, “This is fantastic! It takes you from one floor to another without you having to walk!”
“Yes,” says the other person, “but why don’t you actually get off and look around?”
The experience of the person on the escalator, just continually going up and down, could be an image of what our first reading is describing. “A generation goes, and a generation comes … The sun rises, and the sun sets … Southward goes the wind, then turns to the north; it turns and turns again … All things are wearisome.” There’s a sense of the world continuing remorselessly on its course, and sometimes we feel as though we are passengers simply being carried along, like our friend on the escalator. No doubt after a while the novelty would have worn off and the journey up and down would have become quite tedious. Wearisome indeed!
In the Gospel reading Herod seems like a mere passenger, or spectator. He is the like that person on the escalator, observing everything in the store but never getting off to experience what he sees. Herod is intrigued by Jesus and wonders who he is. We are told he sought to see him but we don’t know if he ever did. Jesus, of course, calls us to something more than this. He invites us to encounter him, to experience him, and to know him. He invites us to get off the escalator of life’s daily round and spend time with him. Then he promises to lead us into new and exciting ways of understanding the world and our place in it. In this way we can discover an alternative to Ecclesiastes’ diagnosis that “all is wearisome” and instead experience the joy of life lived in communion with God.
Mass today is in St Dyfrig & St Samson at 10am.
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