"SALVATION IS FOR ALL; LIKEWISE THE GRACE OF CONVERSION"

 1^st April, 2022:

FRIDAY

FOURTH WEEK OF LENT (C)

(Wis 2: 1a, 12-22); 

(Jn 7: 1-2, 10, 25-30)

Dear brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, today as we paid attention to the expressions of the Lord in the Sacred Scriptures, we knew about the resistance that the workers and messengers of the Lord, including that of His own Son experienced in this world as the powers of the people who went against them ascended against them. There were numerous who obstinately wouldn't follow the Lord and kept in their mischievous behavior, and this multitude of prompted the oppression of the workers of God, coming full circle in the judgment of the Messiah and Son of God Himself, by similar people to whom He had been shipped off.

In the first reading today, we heard from the Book of Wisdom with respect to the plots that the mischievous gathered and arranged against the steadfast prophets of God. It was basically a feature summing up what God's workers and prophets needed to persevere during the hour of their service among people of God. They were frequently detested, dismissed and criticized against, abused and oppressed. They were given out and regarded a role as how outsiders were dealt with, and, surprisingly, more awful than that. Nobody would hear them despite the fact that they expressed God's words and truth.

Those people had shut themselves against God's words and truth, and afterward, as the Book of Wisdom itself additionally talked about what might occur on schedule to come, it was likewise a prescience of the Messiah and how people would treat Him similarly as they had treated the prophets and couriers of God. That was what the future held Gospel section today, in regards to the Lord Jesus and what He encountered as He served among people of God. The main ministers, the Pharisees and the instructors of the Law, as well as people from the Sadducees, all plotted against Him and looked for His destruction.

In any case, that didn't make the Lord to stop His activities and work, as He actually even went to the celebration in Jerusalem, and talked noisily in the Temple announcing reality with regards to Himself. People questioned Him since they generally expected to know where He had come from, a backwater town in Galilee where no prophet or incredible man was forecasted to come, and subsequently believed that He was a fake and, surprisingly, a blasphemer, or that He was intriguing with devils and detestable spirits. Those deceitful incriminations were false and were malevolently made against the Lord to dishonor Him and to subvert His works.

The justification for those untruths and lies? It was reasonable the envy and instability experienced by those equivalent people, the central clerics and the Pharisees who expected that their situation and impact, their honors and power locally would be obliterated and lost to them. They expected that the Lord would grab people from them, perceiving how well known He had become, and this extreme distraction with their common longings and concerns probably kept them from permitting God to make certifiable correspondence with them, as they shut their hearts and psyches against Him.

That would make sense of well why those equivalent people, the ones who ought to have perceived the Lord first when He happened upon their middle, similar ones who ought to have the best information on the Law and the rules of God, the expressions of the prophets and the predictions they talked, why they wouldn't accept despite the fact that every one of the signs and things have pointed obviously to the Lord Jesus being the One Whom the prophets were talking about. They would not acknowledge reality as they surrendered to the allurements of their common longings, the craving for power, fulfillment and magnificence in addition to other things.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, let every one of us contemplate these occasions and think about cautiously our own decisions and ways throughout everyday life. Is it true that we will resemble the Pharisees, the elderly folks and every one people who had oppressed the prophets and couriers of God? Is it safe to say that we will follow them into their insubordination to the Lord? Therefore we should oppose the allurements of common things which frequently lead us down the way of ruin in view of our defiance against God, which intermittently we might even submit without having acknowledged it by any means, similarly as what the Pharisees had done.

In this season of Lent, we all are called to look for the Lord with penitent and open hearts, with minds that are inviting towards the Lord, and the eagerness to pay attention to Him addressing us and approaching us to get back to Him. In this season of compromise and call to contrition, we are completely reminded that we are miscreants needing recuperating and compromise with God. Is it safe to say that we are willing then to put forth the attempt and to do what is required as far as we're concerned to attract nearer and nearer to God and to get the totality of His leniency and empathetic love? The choice and decision is our own to make, brothers and sisters in Christ.

May the Lord be with us generally, and may He enable all of us to live always commendably in His presence, standing by listening to Him and submitting to His will in every single accessible open doors. May we all be genuine models and good examples for each other from here on out, by they way we carry on with our lives as committed Christians, presently and consistently. Amen.