A Reflection for Saturday of the Twenty-third Week in Extraordinary Time
“I’ll show you what someone is like who involves me,
listens to my words, and acts on them.” (Lk 6:47)
An adolescent had a terrible epiphany. She was washing the dishes since it was her turn, aimlessly humming a song she had learned in youth group: “All that I’m, all that I do, all that I’ll ever have, I offer now to you.”
And as those words escaped her lips, the dreadful truth dropped: She was going to must clean out the sink strainer. Normally, she would do a fairly okay job washing many of the dishes, perhaps leaving the worst pans to soak indefinitely, and he or she might even swish out the sink when she was done. However the sink strainer, with its nasty collection of soapy vegetables, stray noodles and miscellaneous gunk, is something you walk away from, because you’ll be able to.
Unless you’re singing a song about offering up your whole self to God, and also you suddenly hear yourself. Then what you do is struggle together with your conscience for a moment, resolve you’re not a raging hypocrite, gloomily pull the strainer out of the drain and trudge over to the rubbish to scrub the disgusting thing out, because there isn’t a asterisk after “all that I do,” specifying “doesn’t apply to miscellaneous gunk.”
It could sound like a trivial story, nevertheless it’s not. It’s exactly what all of today’s readings are about, and Jesus says it’s the way you survive a flood.
Life as an adult in the religion can bring dreadful trials, things that push against our very foundations and threaten to undermine us right where we live.
“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ but not do what I command?” Jesus asks his disciples within the Gospel.
“I’ll show you what someone is like who involves me,
listens to my words, and acts on them.
That one is sort of a man constructing a house,
who dug deeply and laid the inspiration on rock;
when the flood got here, the river burst against that house
but couldn’t shake it since it had been well built.
However the one who listens and doesn’t act
is sort of a one that built a house on the bottom
with no foundation.
When the river burst against it,
it collapsed without delay and was completely destroyed.”
Jesus has a way of escalating quickly, doesn’t he? One minute, he’s chatting along with his friends about prayer, and the subsequent he’s warning them about what’s going to occur when the flood comes.
But that’s how life works. One minute we’re facing these small, trivial trials of integrity—things like integrity in each day prayer, and realizing that singing a song goes together with coping with the gunk within the drain—and the subsequent minute we’re coping with something rather a lot more flood-like. It happens. Life as an adult in the religion can bring dreadful trials, things that push against our very foundations and threaten to undermine us right where we live.
How will we survive that flood? By making a firm foundation with small acts of fidelity to Jesus. Little by little, minor decision by minor decision, faithful selection by faithful selection, small sacrifice by small sacrifice, mixing the words of the Lord into the mortar of our lives. The small sink-side trials are our likelihood to accumulate a habit of attending to the words that come out of our own mouths, and checking ourselves to see in the event that they match with how we act. These little challenges make us who we’re. They’re the constant, mandatory work of integrating the center and the desire. But when we continually excuse ourselves from attending to the little things—a trivial lie here, a small act of hypocrisy there—then we’ll find ourselves utterly defenseless and without integrity when the flood comes.
And it can come. Jesus is just not threatening us; he is solely warning us. But he can be telling us easy methods to be saved.
