Breaking the Word

5^th week in Easter Time, Monday – 29^th April 2024 – Acts 14,5-18; Jn 14,21-26

Remaining As God’s Instrument

In the first reading, Paul and Barnabas meet all types of reactions as they make their journey through Asia Minor. They were rejected in Iconium and glorified and stoned in Lystra for healing a crippled man. After the healing, the Gentiles treated them like Greek gods, “Zeus and Hermes” who have come on earth. Paul and Barnabas point out that they are only instruments in the hand of the one, true God.  They have no desire to receive the honour due only to the living God. It is that God who deserves all the glory and praise. As a reaction, they immediately tear their clothes and deny any claim to deity. In fact, they tell boldly the townspeople that they worship a “vain thing.” Since Paul can’t turn their thinking by showing how Jesus of Nazareth fulfills the prophecies of the Messiah in the Jewish Scriptures, he talks to them about their beginnings, their Creator. He offers the people a relationship with the real God, Creator of the universe who loves them and wants a relationship with them.

God has chosen to work in and through us humans His divine message. It is truly remarkable that God empowers us to be ambassadors of the Good News to others. As we share the Good News, others may mistake the goodness and kindness which we extend to them as simply our gifts, rather it is truly a gift from God. They may try to give thanks to us. But we need to redirect the gratitude to the God to whom it is due.  As we reflect on how God can and does make us instruments of His Message, we need to focus all the attention and praise back to the one who sends us. We are not to be the center of others’ focus. We must point to the God who is in us and working through us.

4^th week in Easter Time, Friday – 26^th April 2024 – Acts 13,26-33; Jn 14,1-6

Fulfillment of Promises

The first reading records one of Paul’s most important sermons, demonstrating Jesus as the Messiah. He summarizes the paschal mysteries of Jesus’s suffering, death and resurrection as fulfillment of salvation history. Paul shows how these events fulfill the Hebrew Scriptures and reveal the close relationship between Jesus and His Father. He makes it clear that the inhabitants and the leaders of Jerusalem failed to recognize the true identity of Jesus as the expected Messiah and as the promised Son of David. In doing what they did, they were only fulfilling the well-known words of the Old Testament Prophets. Paul emphasizes that it is the expected fulfilment of everything that was prophesied. Jesus is the expected climax to the history of God’s people. God fulfills his promises to Abraham and his promise to David by raising up Jesus. Because the risen Jesus is an eternally living son of David, whose reign will never end, he unconditionally fulfills the promise that David’s throne will stand forever (2 Sam 7,13). By his resurrection, Christ was enthroned as Messiah, and from then on, his human nature enjoyed all the privileges of the Son of God.