Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
Be Attentive and Observe
Hello and welcome to Spend Five with Jesus for this Saturday, October 14th, 2023. I am the friar and I’m so happy that you could join us today.
Today’s gospel is really short but there’s a lot packed into it when we really kind of get underneath it and see what’s going on here. So it’s quite simple. Jesus is speaking. A woman in the crowd calls out and says, “Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed.”
And it’s interesting because you’d think, well that that’s true the Blessed Mother she’s amazing and she’s wonderful and isn’t it great that Jesus had such a tremendous and wonderful mother but Jesus gives a response that we really need to spend some time thinking about today. And, it’s namely this. This is his response: “Rather blessed are those who hear the Word of God and observe it.”
Now why is this such a critical distinction that’s being made here by Jesus? Why didn’t he just agree and say, “Yes, my mother is blessed. Yes, the Virgin Mary is tremendous and outstanding and wonderful.”
Because there’s a really, really important point. And even though this comes from the Gospel of Luke, I want to kind of reach over to the Gospel of John because that is also somewhat connected in terms of what we’re doing here, and it’s this.
If you look at the Gospel of John, very, very often you don’t see people identified by their name. Mary, for example, is the mother of Jesus. There is the disciple whom Jesus loved. There are a lot of times where we don’t know a name, we just know that this is a person.
And the purpose for this is that it then enables us to say, “How can I be like this person here? What is it that I can do where I have a demonstration of faith? Where is it that I can find myself doing something outstanding and tremendous because I believe in Jesus.
And that’s the point that Jesus is trying to make. What makes Mary, the Virgin Mother, the Mother of Jesus, so wonderful is first and foremost her faith in Almighty God. That’s the thing that really makes Mary so outstanding and so tremendous. It’s that.
And then yes, there are other things. Obviously she would have had a profound impact in raising her son Jesus. And there would have been tremendous moments where she is a person impacted our Lord. But the truth of the matter is that the reason that she was chosen for all this, the reason that she is so tremendous and wonderful in terms of the plan of salvation, is because she heard the Word of God and she observed it.
And that’s, that’s the challenge for you and me today too. It’s to hear the word of God and then to live it. And that’s really where our greatness can lie. It’s really where when we open ourselves to the grace of God, we can find ourselves being blessed. We can find ourselves living the life that God wants us to live. And so today, take a moment, first of all, just to thank God for being a part of your life and then hear the Word of God, spend some time with the Bible and observe it.
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