12 July 2013
Friday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel from Matthew has Jesus explain the trials that His disciples will face when preaching the Good News:
Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves. But beware of men, for they will hand you over to courts and scourge you in their synagogues…
When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say. You will be given at that moment what you are to say. For it will not be you who speak but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.
So what are the trials Christians face in the western world today? In a lecture he gave at Boston College in 2009, former Superior General of the Dominicans Timothy Radcliffe, OP pointed out that the real enemy to Christian faith is banality. It is the belief that our faith has nothing beautiful, nothing fruitful, to say to the world today. All prose, no poetry.
In a culture that treats Christianity more with polite indifference than outright hostility, it can be easy to turn in ourselves, merely to ‘tend the fire.’ But as Pope Francis reminded us in a March 27th papal audience, “”Following and accompanying Christ, staying with him, demands ‘coming out of ourselves’ … out of a dreary way of living faith that has become a habit, out of the temptation to withdraw into our own plans which end by shutting out God’s creative action.”
For prayer today, consider: where has my vision of faith grown stale, banal, or flabby? What is God’s creative action calling me to consider anew this day?