Tuesday, Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time

According to today’s first reading at a time of national crisis, the Lord, speaking through the prophet Isaiah, says to the king of Judah, ‘If you do not stand by me, you will not stand at all’. Faced with a coalition of enemy nations, Ahaz was tempted to seek refuge by relying on one of the great empires of the day. The message of Isaiah to him was that he needed to rely on the Lord, rather than on any human power, if he and the people were to remain secure. The preaching of Jesus to the towns of Galilee called on them to rely on God, present and active in the ministry of Jesus. According to the gospel reading, the towns of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum failed to do so. In spite of the ways God was powerfully at work through the ministry of Jesus, they didn’t respond to him in a trusting, faithful, way. Behind Jesus’ oracle of judgement addressed to these towns lies a heart that is broken at their failure to respond to his life-giving message. In Luke’s gospel Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because of their failure to recognize the time of God’s visitation through Jesus. Today’s readings invite us to ask ourselves, ‘To whom or what do we turn and on whom or on what do we rely?’ In the words of today’s responsorial psalm, ‘God… has shown himself its stronghold’. Jesus as Emmanuel, God with us, offers himself to us as the stronghold of our lives, the rock on which we can build our lives, the one on whom we can rely when all else fails. Our calling is to keep turning towards him who is always turned towards us.