17 August 2021
Tuesday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s reading from the Old Testament provided Luke with means in which he could cast his retelling of the Annunciation. An angel of the Lord appears to Gideon and tells him that the Lord will be faithful. Gideon, questions the angelic discourse on two accounts. First he notes that if God is faithful, how is that His chosen people are currently under the yoke of the Midian and second, he is the lowliest from a low family. The angel persists in his message, noting that it will be Gideon that will carry the message of deliverance. The Magnificat of Mary echoes a similar theme with Mary’s instance of her lowly stature, and it is to her, in lowliness, that God will work the redemption of Humanity. So often we think that it is the big project or the grand scheme that will be the vehicle for our transformation or the change in others. We fail to take seriously the image that the kingdom of God resembles a mustard seed or a grain yeast, not a complex agenda formed by a select committee. Perhaps the greatest disruption to God’s salvific action is the failure to recognize that God works in the small and the insignificant and not necessarily the powerful and the complex. Today’s reading from the book of Judges recalls a theme that has its high point in Mary’s Magnificat.