Wednesday, July 13, 2022 | Ordinary Time

Wednesday, July 13, 2022 | Ordinary Time

Wednesday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Have you ever tried to look at yourselves as pharisee or scribes? Or have you ever tried to look at yourselves as wise and learned? I have done it many times.

I think being a pharisee is easier than being a Jesus for others. Jesus called the scribes and Pharisees wise, though they did not really possess wisdom but only what appeared to be wise because of their cleverness with words. The difficulty of pharisee or scribes is that I am not looking at people with goodnessbut the failure, untruthful things that people failed to observe.

Some theologians suggest that “Jesus called the fishermen, who were unskilled in evil, children. In this way, the grace of God was clearly manifested as Jesus made himself known to simple men.… And even if it was Christ himself who, for the most part, did these things, nevertheless, by giving thanks for them as things done by the Father, he shows that they share a common will and gives thanks for God’s love for us in the things by which we have received the benefit.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus uses the form of a Jewish prayer of thanksgiving; Jesus praises the Lord of heaven and earth for the favors he has bestowed on his people, whose open acceptance of him shows them to be childlike in their receptivity to the gospel (18:4). Thanks to God’s gracious and elective will, these “little ones” who form the community of Christian disciples have come to know more about Jesus than the religious scholars who oppose the kingdom of heaven, namely the scribes and the Pharisees. The disciples’ willingness to embrace the mystery of Jesus has nothing to do with their intelligence or level of education; rather, they are recipients of a grace that comes from the Father in heaven.

This is the reality of every vocation; God does not love and choose us because we are wise or learned, but because of who God is. God loves and chooses us based on what he is. He may not choose the best among us, but he wants us to be the best of who we are. What we need to do is to humble and empty of the world’s strength and wisdom so that we may receive Christ and his grace.

In order to do so, we need to know that we cannot do anything good without God, and the more we realize that we are imperfect, weak, and limited, the more we can grow in the grace of God. The more we are humble, the more God raises us up.

We can reflect on this question as we continue our journey “Am I weak, broken, lowly, humble, and empty enough to be led by Christ who chose us?

May God bless us!