Today’s readings: Click on today’s date at http://www.usccb.org/bible/
The Jesus civilization
May 18, 2014
Fifth Sunday of Easter
John 14:5-6
“Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Jesus said to Thomas, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
In his book Catholicism, Robert Barron notices that Jesus does not point us to his words. He points us to himself. Unlike the Buddha, unlike Confucius, unlike Mohammad, Jesus points us to himself.
Many see this as arrogance and are put off by it. Jesus just says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” No apology there. “Let the dead bury the dead. Come and follow me.”
The words are important, sure. But Jesus is pushing on us to decide something much more important than the truth of words.
John introduced his gospel with the idea of Jesus being the Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” John experienced this “Word” as a man – Jesus, the flesh and blood man who walked, slept, ate, spoke, and taught his disciples to follow his Father and to follow him.
I keep thinking of a clip shown before each movie at the Ebertfest this year: a few words from Roger Ebert about the value of seeing films about people unlike yourself … becoming able to “somehow step outside your own mind and experience and understand what it is like to be a person of another race, another age, another gender, another nationality, to have different physical capabilities, to have different beliefs.” Watching films about people unlike us is, he thinks, “one of the most profoundly civilizing” experiences we can have.
I realize Jesus calls us into that family of man, when he says in Matthew 25, “Whatever you do for each of these (so different from you), you do for me. And whatever you do not do …”
Jesus will not settle for anything less than this “civilizing” experience. Follow me, Jesus says, as I follow our Father, and together we will truly love each other as we ourselves are loved.
Father, my self-protection is more than skin deep. I am afraid of people who seem so different from me. Forgive me. Jesus, lead me in this new way of freedom, with open arms and open eyes and open heart. You are in charge of the results, not me. Let me just be your lover.
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