Now, today. What keeps us from living
the urgency of the now of Jesus’ presence and action in our lives? "Today.”
says Jesus. “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing." Gratefully the Lord Jesus is relentless. Indeed God uninterruptedly uninterruptedly
converses with us, even today, right now. Today his Word is being fulfilled in our hearing, if
we will allow it. Today. Now, Jesus wants to free those who are oppressed, now he wants to remove our
blindness, now he comes with great good news for us. Now he wants to make of us his compassion and his mercy-makers. Mercy-makers. But too often, perhaps, we find ourselves,
despondent, walking to a nearby village with our heads down, much too slow to
understand.
Living in the todayness
of Jesus’ compassionate presence always involves a surrender and a passover with
him into a place of precariousness and uncertainty, where we are invited to
abandon ourselves and depend on God alone, even unto death, just as he did on
the cross. This happens most often when we crash headlong into our own
limitations, when we do not
know how to go on, when finally, in desperation, exasperation and near despair,
we hand ourselves over into God’s hands, so that he can save us. Then
our today comes.
Probably for most of us some great, earth-shattering
revelation never comes. What we get instead are “daily miracles, illuminations,
matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”*
And that is enough, more than enough for a day, today, the now of Jesus’
inbreaking. Each morning at Mass, Jesus opens the scroll and reveals himself, reveals
our true selves in his Word and in the Sacrament of the Altar, and then we understand
that we are enough in him.
Photograph by Father Emmanuel. Meditation iincludes insights from Gerhard
Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth.
What He Wanted, Who He Was. * Quote by Virginia Woolf.
