Feelings Are
Invaders
Twenty-Sixth Week of Year II Tuesday September 27, 2016
The Responsorial Psalm is a prayer from a man so “without strength” that prayer is all he has left: “Let my prayer come before you, Lord” (Ps. 88).
Job 3: 1-23 is a longing,
not for death as such — no one wants that — but for death as an escape from
pain. When Job “opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth,” he was
expressing his feelings — just as
Jesus did in his agony in the garden: “Father… remove this cup from me.”1
Neither Jesus nor Job turned from God with their wills, but both had human feelings not in harmony with the truth
they believed in.
There
is an important lesson for us in this. To establish the reign of God over
ourselves or others, we do not have to make any feelings go away. For one
thing, it is impossible. Feelings are not subject to our free will; therefore
there is no moral value, good or bad, in any feeling or desire that we have.
Until we choose to “adopt” a feeling,
make it our own, give it permission to be in us, it is nothing but the effect
of some cause, an uninvited intruder in our consciousness, and we are not in
any way guilty for having it, any more than Jesus was guilty or less loving for
wishing, on the feeling level, that he could just call off our redemption! His
will never wavered; that is the important thing.
So
whenever we have any intrusive thought, persistent temptation, obsessive desire
or unwelcome feeling, we should never blame ourselves for it. Jesus, God
himself, suffered the same thing in his human nature. We can try to distract
ourselves, but whether this succeeds or not, we keep declaring our willed desire, our free choice, to God in prayer: “Let my prayer come before you, Lord.”
To
do this is to let God reign over us. It is to exercise faithful stewardship over the life God has given
us.
The
problem is, we often choose to act on
our feelings instead of just ignoring them. In Luke 9: 51-56 “the Samaritans would not welcome” Jesus because Jews
and Samaritans were culturally hostile to each other. They followed their
knee-jerk reaction to Jesus the Jew instead of getting to know Jesus the
person.
James’
and John’s answering knee-jerk reaction was to “call down fire from heaven to
destroy them” as Elijah did.2 But with Jesus things had changed, as
the new “Elijah” who announced him discovered.3 Power and force are
out; vulnerability and mercy are in. Jesus did not take the Samaritans’
reaction as their final choice. He would wait to reach them4 — as we
must wait if we want to establish God’s reign in his way, not ours.
1Luke 22:42.
22Kings 1:
9-13.
3Matthew 11:14, 17: 12, 14: 1-12.
4John
4:39; Acts 8: 1-14.
Initiative:
Be Christ’s steward. Follow faith, not feelings, in your choices.
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