27 June 2015
Saturday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
The centurion in today’s gospel, who declines the visit of Christ to his own house with the famous words “Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof,” is a role model for us in many ways. Of course, the Church, by quoting him in its Eucharistic liturgy, holds him up as a role model for humility and for awareness of personal unworthiness of God’s gifts of grace, and especially of the gift of the Eucharist.
Those of us who are struggling to live a life of prayer and renewed intimacy with Christ can draw another lesson from this same centurion. If we are asking for a certain gift from God, say, charity towards our neighbor, is it enough for us to acquire that gift according to God’s plan, or do we demand that Jesus “enter under our roof,” so to speak, that he appear to us in some way that we can see or hear him? Do we demand a sign, a supernatural intervention, a miracle? Or can we accept a decision from God involving other means, even natural, slow, painstaking ones?
In fact, knowing what we do about our own sinful past, and our ingrained sinful tendencies, and our own unworthiness: which means is, after all, for us, more fitting?