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

Tuesday 7 December 2021

Second Week of Advent

Word for today
The Gospel of Matthew 18:12-14

The stray one

Who is the stray one?
What is so important about it that losing it sets off such compelling search efforts and finding it provokes so much joy?
Why is it that the remaining ninety-nine do not provoke the shepherd's same passionate attention as does the stray one?
The ninety-nine that are safe and sound in the enclosure do not, in fact, provoke the delight, the excitement, and the rejoicing as does the stray one.
The stray one is each one of us, any of the little ones when it loses its way, its inner light, when it loses the flavor of the salt of spiritual intelligence.
We are the stray ones, all of us when we lose the way of love. The stray one is each one of us when we lose our inner peace and take the path of fear, judgment, and resentment.
Why is the Eternal Shepherd's heart so involved in a consuming, incessant search for the stray one? Because of love, infinite love, infinite compassion and mercy, indeed. But that is not all of it. How can we explain all the joy and excitement described in the Gospel that the Eternal Shepherd experiences when He finds one, only one of His little ones?
In the vision of the whole and the one, in the absolute vision of the divine heart, the stray one is in danger not because it is lost, but because it is isolated, separated.
Only God in his heart  knows how the devil, the one who divides, has been struggling against God's children. The devil has always and incessantly, by any means, at any time and in any form, with any strategy, been seeking only one single thing: to separate us from God, unity, and love.
For God's heart the real problem does not lie in the fact that the stray one is astray, it is not that it has gotten lost, it is not that it has sinned or made a mistake; the real problem is that the stray one faces the risk of separating itself from the whole and the one. Sin in itself is not the problem, but sin as an action that can cause separation is the problem. When the Eternal Shepherd finds one of these little ones, heaven rejoices and sings celestial chants  because it is not the remaining ninety-nine that create  unity, but rather the ninety-nine plus the stray are the whole and the one of God's love.