Thirty Third Sunday Ordinary Time Cycle C
11/08/2022
November 13, 2022
"By your endurance (perseverance) you will gain your lives."
Have you given up on looking at your spiritual life?
Have you even stopped thinking about it on a daily basis?
Many of the people in the first reading, having returned from exile in 450 BC, failed to see what God had done for them.
They were abandoning their believe in God. They just wanted to live the good life. The prophet tells them the end will come. Return to God.
The prophet Malachi was encouraging them to not forget how God had forgiven them and taken them out of the Exile in Babylon, and brought them back to Jerusalem.
Saint Paul was addressing the same problem in the Christian Community to which he wrote . Some were forgetting what God had call them to through their Baptism. They were not to just sit around, as some had done, but they were to make God present in the world by their lives and actions.
At times we can see our own exile of our sins, of our dysfunctions, of our addictions and just plain give up or even worse, just ignore them.
God wants to feed us with his forgiveness, but we do have to work at continually looking deeply at ourselves, at our failures to fulfill the call we were given at our Baptism to make God present, and that can be very hard work. We may even get lazy and falsely believe that we do not sin or we do not sin very big. What a deception!
Just think about the following...
Love the other as yourself, every person as yourself.
Sin is always a tragedy and we do sin. God, again today, will bring us out of our exile, our sins. That is what Christ is about, again and again, day after day.
But we do have to look deeply at our spiritual self and not be scandalized by what we see. We will do this again and again until we die. Don't give up. The force of evil will always hint at us to give this up.
Don't listen to that voice.
Remember God does not give up on us.
The last line of the Gospel this Sunday says...
"By your endurance, perseverance,
you will gain your lives."
Courage.
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