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

Saturday 30 October 2021

Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time

Word for today
The Gospel of Luke 14:1.7-11

Warnings

They are attached in many different ways and on almost all the products on the market, from food  to drugs, from detergents to wine, from mobile phones to refrigerators. They are warnings. Every product has its own and they inform consumers about many different things, but their main purpose is to help consumers to avoid using the product in an incorrect or improper way and to promote its correct use.
Even life, our earthly experience, has its warnings and we can find them written in the Gospel of Jesus. They are not procedures, they are warnings. They warn and guard humanity against misusing the gift of life, and they try to help makind to use the gift of life and of his/her person in the most correct and effective way. One of Jesus' favorite warnings is For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. This may sound like a threat, but in reality it is a warning, a beautiful precise warning. It all starts with a feeling of inferiority. A feeling of inferiority is generated by our mental training system, by humiliation, and by  wounds and from our complete lack of faith and honor in ourselves and in our Eternal Father. The feeling of inferiority generates within us an abyss in our self-perception, which in reality can be recuperated by restoring our faith and love towards ourselves and God. Or it can, on the other hand, be filled by ambition and the race for places in the front. 
Just as hay catches fire quicker than a centenarian old trunk, so ambition is ignited easier in small minds emptied by a sense of inferiority than in those with a deep inner spirituality.
Jesus warns us that the desire to sit in the first places -- that is ambition -- is dangerous as a form of insanity because if practiced with decision and determination it certainly leads to a schizophrenic state. Jesus warns those who exalt themselves and pursue first positions as a result of their ambition will experience failure and humiliation, because it is the mental orientation of those who already feel they have failed. Efforts to attain first positions in success, in power, in hierarchy is the last escape for inner failure, for the necrosis of mental abilities. Since ambition is the fruit of a feeling of inferiority, how can it lead to anything different from than inferiority, that is, from what it was generated? What Jesus announces is not a threat, but a warning: For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted, because for everyone who exalts himself means that they already feel humiliated and losers and will not be able to generate anything else for themselves but failure and humiliation. Not the person who feels humiliated, but he/she who is humble will have access to higher levels of evolution and of happiness.