Wednesday, Twenty Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Normally if we are sent on a task and we accomplish it well, it is a reason for some degree of personal satisfaction. However, when Jonah preached the message to the people of Nineveh that God had asked him to preach and the people of that city responded wholeheartedly to Jonah’s message, it made him angry. Jonah would have preferred if he had failed, if the people of Nineveh had ignored his message and suffered the consequences. Instead, by responding as they did, they experienced the God of Israel as a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger and rich in graciousness. Even though Jonah, under compulsion, preached the message God had asked him to preach, his heart was closed to the people of Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, the sworn enemies of Israel. In contrast, God’s heart was as open to Israel’s enemies as to Israel itself. We all need to allow our own outlook and vision to expand so that it corresponds more to God’s outlook and vision. Perhaps that is why the opening petition of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples was, ‘Father, may your name be held holy, your kingdom come’. Jonah was working out of his own little kingdom, which corresponded to Israel, and out of his own limited perspective. This can be true of all of us. Each day we are to pray for the coming of God’s kingdom, so that the world may be as God wants it to be. This is a world where everyone, including our traditional enemies, are assured of daily sustenance. It is a world where we are to forgive one another, including our enemies, otherwise we set up a block within ourselves for receiving God’s forgiveness. In this world, shaped by God’s values, we will need to pray that, when our faith in the priority of God’s kingdom is put to the test, God will give us the strength to stand firm rather than settling for the promotion of our own kingdom.

7th October, Our Lady of the Rosary

This feast has its origins in history. It has been celebrated since the Christian victory of the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.The victory was attributed by Pope Saint Pius V to the recitation of the Rosary. This great Marian prayer is sometimes traced back to the preaching of Saint Dominic and his companions against the Albigensian heresy in the thirteenth century. However, it seems more likely that it took its current, familiar, form in the fifteenth century. In the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles chosen for this memorial, there is a gathering in the ‘upper room’ in Jerusalem of the group of eleven, ‘together with several women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers’ (Acts 1:14). The risen Lord had told his followers ‘not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father’ (Acts 1:4). They were now gathered together prayerfully waiting for ‘the promise of the Father’, waiting to be ‘clothed with power from on high’ (Luke 24:49), the power of the Holy Spirit. This image of Mary as prayerfully waiting in the midst of the church for the coming of the Holy Spirit seems very appropriate to the prayer of the Rosary. It is a prayer where the words that are spoken are less important than the meditative attitude they seek to engender. Our praying of the Rosary is a moment of prayerful waiting. The repetition of the ‘Hail Mary’, the ‘Our Father’ and the ‘Glory be to the Father’ open us up to receive afresh the gift of the Holy Spirit into our lives. In the gospel reading Mary is told that the Holy Spirit would come upon her and ‘the power of the Most High’ would cover her with its shadow. The fruit of this overcoming of the Holy Spirit would be a child ‘who will be holy and will be called Son of God’. Just as the Holy Spirit empowered Mary to bring forth Jesus for the world, so the coming of the Spirit into our lives empowers us to bring the risen Lord into our own place and time. As we prayerfully open ourselves to the Holy Spirit while praying the Rosary, we are sent from the Rosary as the Lord’s witnesses in the world