In this section you can find a daily commentary on the Gospel of the Day.

Wednesday 28 October 2020

Ss Simon and Jude, aposles

Word for today
The Gospel of Luke 6:12-19

Choise

Jesus went up to the mountain to pray,  he spent the night praying to God, His Father. When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and  he chose twelve of these and called them apostles. He chose Simone, giving him the name Peter, the same Peter who will deny Him three times. He chose Thomas, who would be so doubtful about the resurrection; he chose Judas who will betray Him and sell Him to the enemy for a few coins. He chose all the others who are ofen described in the gospel as being full of ambition, envy, fear, prejudice, so weak in their faith and capacity to understand, arrogant, proud, fragile. He chose all the others who, in the days of His persecution and death on the cross, will be so frighttened that they will run away and hide. Jesus, after a night spent in intimate prayer with the Father, chose those those ones. So our little minds ask: if he had not prayed, who would He have chosen? Our small human mind believes that Jesus prayed the Father for an entire night, and who knows how many other times he did the same thing, to carefully and wisely choose His apostles, but that is not what happened.
Is it possible that the One Who see and knows everything, the One Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, the One through Whom everything was created and made and without Whom nothing that exists could have been created, does not know who to choose? Is it possible that Jesus was not in such perfect, intimate, absolute, uninterrupted union and unity with the Father and the Paraclete Spirit that He needed to pray for a whole night in order to have the vision and wisdom to choose His men? 
Jesus did not pray to know something, to get advice, to discuss His options, but to love, and, in love, to generate love. Jesus asks the Father to generate all love’s energy necessary to those little twelve men to begin their adventure with the gospel, in the world. Jesus did not spend an entire night in loving and intimate prayer with the Father to choose the best amongst His disciples, the most perfect; he prayed to create the energetic conditions and strength of Spirit so that the ones he chose, so limited and poor, would never be lacking  the strength, the desire, the joyful will to always improve and never fall into the Evil One's most powerful, sovereign temptation: the one of giving up once they had fallen.  Jesus, praying the Father, generated a bridge of beautiful and powerful energy that allowed the apostles,  if they were willing, to get up after every fall, to move forward after every failure and mistake. People do not know that the position Satan wishes to see and keep man in is in a kneeling one, a position that is also very dear to God.  It is Satan's favourite position because when from the regal erect position of a child of God, man is crushed by his own errors against love, when he is crushed by evil, by humiliation, violence, misery, ignorance of evil powers and forces, he gets into an intermediate position: that of getting on his knees.   Satan finds pleasure in seeing and keeping the children of God kneeling, subdued, oppressed, exhausted, afraid of his own shadow, of God, and of life. That is the reason why the most powerful of Satan’s temptations is not the one that makes man wander away from God’s love and light, but the one that keeps him kneeling after the fall, without the desire or the will to get up, without trust in the boundless love of God. God too loves to see man kneeling, because from that position man can go to his inner dialogue and become aware of how much he misses God’s love and light; he can humbly ask and offer forgiveness, and he can get up again with the dignity and nobility of God’s children and start walking again. Jesus prayed the Father to offer the apostles His strength, energy and desire to always, always, always want to get up again trusting in God's compassion every time they fall/fell. Jesus did not choose those men because they were the ones who never fell, but because they were the best  at always getting up again and setting out again with joy from their kneeling position in God's compassion once they had fallen.  God does not choose for Himself those that never fall but those who always get up.  It is only by experimenting, while kneeling, the loving penetration of God’s compassion that the apostle will be/were able to penetrate with compassion God’s children. This is what the Gospel is referring to when it says: Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all. The power that comes from Jesus that heals and save everything and everybody is God’s compassion for His children, the same compassion God inspires His children to feel towards their brothers. God’s compassion exists as healing energy through Jesus. God’s compassion is also represented by the place where Jesus stopped to deliver His Word as a gift to His people, to illumine them with His wisdom, to heal them from any evil.  If the Apostles are not the men of God’s compassion, they are not men of God but men of religion, and they will not be able to give birth to the church of God's people. It is the church of churchmen who  living so long without compassion, since Jesus' time, has generated over these centuries a spiral of evil, poisonous energy, which will now materialize and fall on the church itself, on the entire church, on the church of God's people, in a persecution that has never been seen before and will never be seen again. This last  persecution will be much more brutal and terrible than the first one, it will take place suddenly and it will not last the time to fill the chalices of blood which for  thousands of years have been lifted up to the sky, empty of God’s compassion but filled with the names of religion, power, prestige.