+ The gospel passage today
needs
clarification. When Peter says “We have given up everything Lord to follow
you,” Jesus in just one sentence “covers many bases:” – Yes, Peter, thank you
for doing that, and for your sacrifice you who gave up everything, will get the
value of everything back 100-fold (meaning: many, many times over). You will
get houses, and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and children and
lands and persecutions and then, the icing on the cake, eternal life in the
world to come. Not a bad exchange at all.
So, he not saying we will get
a hundred houses: but the “value” of a hundred houses, and families etc. in
that we will belong to the new family of God – a real, true, and authentic
family – with God as Father, and each other – all over the globe – as brothers
and sisters. And yes we will and must get the same kind of persecution that
faced me, Jesus, but the golden ring at the end is ETERNAL LIFE IN A NEW
HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH!
This then is the meaning of
the Scripture and is our HOPE this day! And the way that we access all this is
to BELIEVE IN JESUS, but also simply to BELIEVE JESUS – believe what he says:
and set our whole entire hearts and beings on it! It is his will for us to
believe, to live in a very carefree way here in the world no matter what each
day might bring – because each moment of the day brings God’s deep abiding
presence, love, and healing remedies for it all! We must be still as a post,
still as the post, the tree that Jesus was crucified on, so that we can obtain
the blessed fruit of the resurrection!
So, let us, as it says in the
first reading, “gird the loins of our minds and understand what God reveals,
live soberly and joyfully, and set our hopes completely on the grace to be
brought to us” at the slightest inclination and prayer that we need it!
Amen.
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