What Is Your Focus?

September 10: Wednesday of Week 23 of Ordinary Time, Year A-II:

1 Corinthians 7:25-31; Psalm 45:11-12, 14-15, 16-17; Luke 6:20-26

What is Jesus saying to us as stewards of his kingship? 

(To support Reaching Jesus ... Step Five).

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“Let those who use the things of the world, do so as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:25-31).

All vision is filtered. We see everything through the lens of our existing attitudes, values, priorities and preferences. This is “cultural conditioning.” Its bad elements are inseparable from Original Sin.

Jesus threw Original Sin into reverse gear when he declared, “Blessed are you who are poor.” That, and the rest of the Beatitudes, flies in the face of everything we are brought up to believe, even in the most Christian families and schools. Our whole culture is organized around the unchallenged assumption that it is normal to try to become affluent, and that it is not good “when people hate you, exclude and insult you.”

The naïve think they are “nonconformists” when they stop going to Church. But churchgoers are just as deceived if they think they are hearing the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a parish that takes affluence and social acceptability for granted. To them Jesus says, “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil.” To authentic Christians, “stewards of his kingship,” he says, “You do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you” (John 7:7; 15:19).

PRAY: “Lord, let me be faithful.”

PRACTICE: Challenge attitudes, values, policies. Work for change.