12 July 2018
Thursday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
A few years ago, during my regency assignment, I taught an undergraduate class called Religion and Politics. In one of the class sessions, I asked my students to read Pope Benedict XVI’s brilliant encyclical letter, Spe Salvi. In the letter, the Pope wrote, “the recovery of what man had lost through the expulsion from Paradise was expected from faith in Jesus Christ: herein lies “redemption”. Now, this ‘redemption’, the restoration of the lost ‘Paradise’ is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis.” When one of my students read this passage, he asked a simple question; “What does the faith in Jesus mean?”
I think one of the answers to that question can be found in Matthew’s Gospel. By subduing the storm at sea, by exorcising demons, and in today’s Gospel, by forgiving sins, Jesus goes beyond the powers attributed to any worldly religious leader. Today’s story in Matthew’s Gospel is the final story that echoes Matthew’s description of Jesus that constitutes another blow against the power of evil (sin often personified with the forces of evil) and Jesus’ move toward God’s reign. So the faith in Jesus Christ is faith in a man who can defeat the storm at sea, demons, disease and sin one by one.
In Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict cited the story of Bernard of Clairvaux who inspired a multitude of young people to enter the monasteries of his reformed order. Nevertheless, Bernard explicitly states that not even the monastery can restore Paradise, but he maintains that, as a place of practical and spiritual “tilling the soil”, it must prepare the new Paradise. A wild plot of forest land is rendered fertile—and in the process, the trees of pride are felled, whatever weeds may be growing inside souls are pulled up, and the ground is thereby prepared so that bread for body and soul can flourish.
In your prayer today, perhaps you can reflect on your faith in the power of Christ to prepare the new paradise. Do you believe that Christ is preparing a plot for you in His new paradise? Or, perhaps what you need to pray for is the increase of faith in Christ. Understand that no paradise will arise where souls are overgrown with the weeds of sin.