27/10/2024

The relationship that IAMIAM has with his people in the Old Testament lasts for centuries in human time. There are many times the people fail and see themselves as punished for their transgressions. 

In the New Testament Jesus responds to Mary's request for him to save her friends in Cana from the embarrassment of running out of wine at the wedding feast. She knows that he can but Jesus first demurs and then does as his mother asks. He knows that he has now begun his mission and can no more enjoy being a simple human being in the obscurity of Nazareth.

He is the Son of God, of IAMFATHERSONANDHOLYSPIRIT.

After the first miracle Jesus gives many other signs of his divine being. At the feeding miracles he always works through his Apostles the twelve whom he has ordered to follow him. When he cures the individual sick, however, he reaches out with love in answer to the petitions  of  themselves or their loved ones. 

Today Bartimaeus annoys the crowd by his loud-mouthed disturbance but Jesus answers his plea and cures him explaining that it is Faith that has saved him. What is the Faith that brings relief to the possessed, the lame, the deaf and the dumb?

All of the miracle cures of the sick were of people who had come to the end of their tether in the misery that was living as incomplete humans. The possessed were damaged in their brains, the crippled in their limbs, the blind in their eyes and their lives were unjoyful. They heard that there was someone from Nazareth who could cure and they reached out to him as their last resort.

In his miracles Jesus reveals to the community of his followers, to the followers of the Law, to his Church that he responds to the isolated, the damaged of this world, the hopelessly addicted who know only pain and anger, the truly weak who know that they are despised and treated as less than human. The Jews of  the Third Reich, anyone under the Rising Sun, the original inhabitants of the New World, the negroes of South Africa.   

 Our God has experienced for himself what it is to be scourged by life, rejected by his own people, the target of spittle, humiliated by nakedness, to become in the hands of men a "thing" to be hung by nails from the cross. He who has known the totality of human suffering is ever ready to respond positively to "Faith" that may be the result of a long but basically comfortable struggle (my own) or the blinding flash of realisation coming with the drawn out death on another cross to the "Good Thief". 

Dear Lord, Help me to stay with you and pray today. I ask that I can seek you with the total sincerity of the truly poor and damaged, those who trapped in the reality that brings death to them everyday and whose response is anger. How else could such victims of evil men respond other than with anger? We have got it wrong by telling ourselves that we live your way, truth and life in the Institutional Churches of this World, and have spent too much time making sure that ourselves and families are at peace and joyful but forgetting that our enemies are our brothers and sisters and that it is their human pain that you know which calls out for the cessation that only you can give to the wars in Africa and Middle-East. May the prayers of Mary and All the saints help me to become all that I should be as a witness to the evil of mankind and by prayer achieve what is beyond me as a man. Please return, Lord Jesus, without you our world is hopeless. We first prayed "Maranatha" let your will be done on Earth now just as it is in heaven. Amen