What is God doing? Reflection for Monday, March 31, 2025

“Lo, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.” In today’s first reading, we are challenged to a broader understanding the plan of God. Just what is God doing? Readings for Today.

What is God doing?

I don’t know about you, but often when I think of the resurrection, I am usually focused on people. Can I except God’s gift of salvation? Can I be faithful to God and experience his profound gift of new life?

Yet today’s first reading from Isaiah stretches the plan of God. Thinking about what God will do needs to be stretched beyond the understanding that it is all about us. God tells us that his plan is much bigger. It is not just humans that will experience the great gift of resurrection, but there will be a new heavens and a new earth. Everything will be new.

Isn’t it often the case that we see the plans of God as too small? Consider that our Lord Jesus, when he changed water into wine, did so in an extravagant way. Hundreds of gallons of wine. Making the blind see. Healing those at death’s door. God does nothing in a small way.

Where is it that you need to experience something big from God? Where is it that you need to stretch more fully the openness of your heart to receive what God wants to offer? In what ways does God call you to hand over to him your brokenness and sin, so that he can offer you forgiveness and mercy?

Today Jesus is in Galilee, a non-Jewish area. Shortly before today’s gospel, Jesus has entered Samaria and encountered the Samaritan woman at the well. All this to say that Jesus is not in a Jewish area. He is not, as we might say, “preaching to the choir.”

But the message reinforces what Isaiah the prophet tells us about God’s words. It is not just the Jewish people (who were expecting the Messiah) but all people who will experience God’s wonderful gift of Jesus. Again the promise of God is not small. Rather, it is big, expansive.

Today this should give us all a great sense of hope. God intends to create a new heavens and a new earth. So everything will be made new by God. And if God is making heaven and earth new, then there can be room for us.

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