12 May 2021
Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Easter
“Heaven and earth are full of your glory.”
I knew an older religious brother who worked with the youth for many years. This brother was a mechanic and often times in class, students would be working on fixing things but would be very far from doing it right. The brother would wait until they did one thing right and then he would say “Hey, bobby, good job holding that hammer the right way up, you know some things.” When he told me this story I laughed. I was amused at how he looked for the simplest of actions to praise. I asked him why he did this. The brother said: “I try and catch the boys doing something right; too often people only seek to catch their pupils doing something wrong.” This piece of well-earned wisdom has stuck with me ever since and something I’ve tried to emulate in my own life.
It seems to be what Paul is doing in today’s reading: he is evangelizing by trying to ‘catch’ his listeners doing or thinking something right and, from this, to build on top of it with the message of Christ. Paul, once he noticed something that the Greeks got right about a religious impulse, said “hey, you know some things” and “hey, here is a bit more worth knowing about.” Paul looked for signs of the natural human longing for God present already – in their temples, in their poetry, in their culture – and he began his preaching there, by showing how this natural longing that existed within Greek culture for something real and yet unknown was unknown no longer in light of Christ.
In our prayer today, let us reflect over this method of Paul’s evangelization and ask how we might be inspired to go and do likewise in our living out and preaching the Gospel within our families, our work, and our wider culture.