Wednesday, Tenth Week in Ordinary Time

In today’s gospel reading Jesus is very clear that he hasn’t come to abolish the Jewish religious tradition, contained in the Law and the Prophets, which his parents passed on to him as a child growing up in Nazareth. He had profound respect for his own faith tradition. It shaped the person he was. Yet, he wanted to renew that tradition. He came to bring it to completion, because the God of Israel was speaking even more powerfully through him than God had spoken through the Law and the Prophets. We are invited to have the same respect for the Jewish Scriptures that Jesus had. Like Jesus, we don’t abolish what we have come to call the Jewish Scriptures, or try to cast it aside. Those who tried to do that in the early church in the century after Jesus were considered heretics at the time. Yet, we read the Jewish Scriptures in the light of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Because Jesus is the fullest revelation of God possible in human form, he is the key to the deeper meaning of the Jewish Scriptures. Today’s first reading from the Jewish Scriptures features one of the prophets, Elijah. Jesus often refers to Elijah in the gospels and he may have recognized John the Baptist as an Elijah figure. Jesus would have recognized that Elijah still had something to say to us. At the beginning of our first reading, Elijah asks the people, ‘How long do you mean to hobble, first on one leg then on the other? If the Lord is God, follow him’. Jesus likewise calls on us to give ourselves over fully over to God in loving devotion, insisting that we cannot serve two masters. However, Jesus called on people to follow him, rather than to follow God. It is in serving Jesus our risen Lord that we serve God, because Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. We spend our lives learning to live under the Lordship of Jesus, allowing him to shape our lives through his Holy Spirit, because this is God’s will for all our lives.