Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. Make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Today we celebrate the third Sunday in Ordinary Time.
The Opening Prayer Almighty and ever living God, direct our actions according to your good pleasure that in the name of your beloved Son we may abound in good works through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A Reading from the Old Testament from the Book of Jonah, third chapter, first through the fifth verse and the tenth verse. The Word of the Lord came to Jonah saying, set out for the great city of Nineveh and announce to it the message that I will give you. So Jonah made ready and went to Nineveh according to the Lord’s bidding. Nineveh was an enormously large city.
It took three days to go through it. Jonah began his journey through the city and had gone but a single day’s walk, announcing, 40 days more and Nineveh will be destroyed. When the people of Nineveh believed God, they proclaimed a fast, and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth. When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them. He did not carry it out. The Word of the Lord Responsorial Psalm Teach me your ways, O Lord.
A reading from the New Testament from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 7:29, 31st verse I tell you, brothers and sisters, the time is running out. From now on, let those having wives act as not having them. Those weeping is not weeping, those rejoicing is not rejoicing, those buying as not owning those using the world as not using it fully, for the world in its present form is passing away the Word of the Lord. Alleluia Verse the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel.
The Gospel for this Sunday is taken from St. Mark 1, chapter 14, 20th verse after Jesus had been arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the Gospel of God, this is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel. As he passed by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea. They were fishermen.
Jesus said to them, come after me and I will make you fishers of men. Then they abandoned their nets and followed him. He walked along a little farther and saw James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. They too were in the boat mending their nets. Then he called them. They left their father Zebedee in the boat along with the hired men, and they followed him.
The Gospel of the Lord as we begin this ordinary time of the year, we’re going to be reflecting, as we always do, year after year, on the ministry of this God man, Jesus. And probably one of the most tragic things that happens is we take the Old Testament, with its focus on justice, focus on punishing the evil and rewarding the good. We take that way of God working with people in the Old Testament, and we continue to carry it over in the New Testament. And we don’t listen to the heart of the message of Jesus. And we end up living in a world of justice. And the world of justice basically looks at evil and hates what it does and condemns it and punishes for it.
And it’s so hard for the church and for all of us to believe that that is not the way that God is fully revealing who he is. It’s not the thing that we should be living in any longer. And I love that one phrase from the Old Testament reading that’s just so strong. We all know the story of Jonah, the reluctant prophet who didn’t really want to see the Ninevites change. He’s a perfect example of the thinking of the Old Testament. Bad people need to be punished.
Good people need to be rewarded. And so when basically, Jonah was so anxious to see the Ninevites pay for their evil that when God said, all right, ask them to change, but tell them if they don’t change that I will destroy them and use that as a motive of fear and see if they change. And Jonah was hoping they wouldn’t, but they did. But then the most interesting thing that God says about that action that he did, that he convinced people to no longer do what they were doing because he threatened them with destruction, he calls that evil. This is the line. When God saw by their actions, they turned from their evil ways.
He repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them. He repented of the evil he had Threatened to do them. Does that mean God sinned and now he’s sorry? No. What he’s revealing in that statement is that the God who is the God who fully reveals himself in Jesus is a lover, a forgiver, not a judge, not a condemner. And he will always, always find a way to accept the shadow that we’re in and long to change it.
But he no longer requires that we be the ones that change it. Fear is the great motive for self change. But what God is trying to initiate in all of us through the coming into a human being and speaking the way he spoke to us, he’s saying, I don’t expect you to change yourself. I will change you. Redemption is the change, the Holy Spirit descending into you, illuminating your eyes to see the reality of the life that you’re called to live. And to know that there is a purpose for evil, there’s a reason for sin, and it’s not to be punished or to be controlled or to be crushed.
It’s to be surrendered to and embraced. Wow. Does that make sense? Not if you’re living in the Old Testament. Look at the reading from the Gospel and what it’s really saying is that when Jesus came into the world, what he did, he was calling his followers and he was calling them by saying, look, I want you to come and stay with me, dwell with me, hang out with me. That was the interesting thing that Jesus was doing the Old Testament.
God was someone who needed to be listened to and then followed, obeyed. Now it’s not so much a God to listen to, but a God to see, to watch, to be in his presence. Jesus is God incarnate. So in the New Testament, we have an experience not of a message from God that we have to listen to and obey, but the presence of God that enters into us and that changes us. The disciples spent three years, three long years with Jesus. At the end, they were still confused, doubted him, expected him to do something that he didn’t really do.
They thought he’d be a great political leader. They knew, they thought he’d put them in a special position. They were caught in the Old Testament image of life and power and control. And they had no idea what they were being invited into. And when did it change? When did they finally see?
Two things happened. One, Jesus came and told them what it was. Imagine he dies and he comes back and the first things he says to his followers is, don’t be afraid of what’s just happened. You’ve doubted me. You’ve done the worst thing you could possibly do to me. You ran, you hid, you.
You weren’t there for me, except for John was. And so he’s saying, look, that isn’t the issue. The issue that you failed me is not the issue. The issue is that just look at what you did. Accept what you did. It’s normal to do what you did.
It’s human nature to do what you did. But what I’m telling you is I’m going to enter into you and my spirit coming into you is going to forgive you in the way that forgiveness really works. It isn’t just that your sin is written off. No, forgiveness is that your eyes are open to see the reason why we struggle with evil. Why do we struggle with it? Why didn’t God just erase it?
Well, he didn’t. Because there’s a teaching that’s so clear. If you look at the life of Jesus, what did he really do? We mentioned it last week. He went through a process of surrendering to a plan that looked very much like evil was destroying this human being’s God figure. And so we see that evil was there to destroy the message of Jesus.
But what it really did, they tried to destroy him, you know, but you can’t destroy God, nor can you destroy the truth, nor can you destroy the spirit of God that’s in you and in me. And so when someone attacks that truth and wisdom inside of you, what it is, it’s the opportunity for you to realize, wait a minute. If something is attacking this essence of the message of Jesus, then something is out of balance. There’s a division inside of me. There’s a part of me that believes that I am forgiven and I will be changed. There’s a part of me that believes that I’m responsible for all my actions, and if I do something wrong, I deserve to be punished.
And I find myself hating myself, hating other people that don’t do what they do. That’s the hangover from the Old Testament. So how can I convince you in this short homily of the importance of knowing what it is that God has done by dying on the cross and forgiving, making up for all of our sins? He is forgiveness. And forgiveness means that he has this really unique way of looking at you and looking at me and seeing you as both a combination of goodness and evil. And I’ll tell you one thing really clearly that you need to remember is grace.
God’s spirit is always about unification. When you live in the world of evil, in the world of justice, let’s say in the world, not that justice is evil, but it’s incomplete. But you look at, you live in that world, then basically what you’re going to do is you’re going to see evil as the enemy that needs to be cut out of you. Not surrendered to, not accepted, but cut out of you, hated. And what do you do if you’re given a challenge to do something that only God can do, what’s going to happen? Well, you pretend it’s happening.
You pretend you can do it. What do I mean? Let’s take this as a principle. Every human being has a light and a darkness in them. It’s just human nature. The darkness comes maybe because it’s inherited from our ancestors.
A lot of times it’s because we’ve been wounded by the people who raised us in the world that we live in. Not that it’s done intentionally, but we get caught up in all kinds of lies and illusions, right? So we are a human being who has both positive and negative qualities. Now, what Jesus is saying is, I look at you and see you that way and I forgive automatically everything in you. That’s not what it should be. I don’t let your sins separate me from you.
I’m here for union and communion. My forgiveness is I accept you totally as you are. That means I’m constantly pouring affirmation and love into you. And guess what happens in that process? There comes about a way, a wisdom that I can’t describe how it works exactly. But when you decide the evil in you is not something that makes you feel unworthy of being in the presence of others, when you stop letting evil rob you of the peace of what it means to be loved by God, when you stop that, you enter into this place of light and wholeness, unity.
The fact that you have a dark side and light side does not mean that you are schizophrenic or that there’s something wrong with you. It means you’re being, you’re human. And if you can accept that part of your humanity and take the part that’s not what it should be and say, I can’t change this. I can see it, you can show it to me, and I can recognize it as evil, and I can own it, and then you can change it, then you can change it. Because the only person that can change our nature like that is the divine nature of God. And the only way you can do it is if you allow him to do it.
And you can’t allow him to do it unless you accept it as part of yourself and know that you’re loved in spite of it. So this idea of repentance is very, very important to understand. Repentance is a change of heart that’s based on an opening of our consciousness and our awareness of what is real. And when we see things as they are and we accept them without self judgment and condemnation, then we are in a new place, A new place. And we regret. That’s the word.
Repent means to regret. We regret the disunity that we allow to happen within us by looking at one part of us and hating it, looking at the other part of us and saying, oh, I’m wonderful. We’re both. Forgiveness gives us the opportunity to be one with our shortcomings and our failings. Not to say they’re okay, but to say they’re part of me. They’re not me.
They’re a part of me. They’re part of my human nature. And what I need to do is to know that I can’t change that. The only way I can really change myself is to say, I will destroy that part of myself. And then you can’t really destroy part of yourself because the shadow is part of the gift. So if you try to destroy your shadow, you’re going to destroy part of your virtuous life.
And how do you pretend to destroy it? How do you do it? Denial. I don’t have that part in me. There’s nothing dark in me. Notice people when you try to point out a weakness that they have.
And if they say, yeah, I know, I’m really, that’s really a mess. I’ve done that all my life. And I’m really, I don’t know, trying to get out of it, but I can’t. Versus somebody says, what are you talking about? There’s nothing in me that’s like that. You don’t know, you know what you’re talking about.
Denial. If you’re denying part of yourself, you’re dividing yourself. And then sin is done. It’s wicked work. You’re living in a world of duality, whether you, you, you accept the part of you that’s wonderful and you reject the part of you that’s not. You live in this tension.
You live in self hatred, refusal to forgive. And you can’t find peace because when you don’t accept evil, it controls you and you will be divided. And the interesting thing, it’s one thing to say, well, I hate myself for evil, but I accept everybody else. No you don’t. Nobody is going to treat themselves different than they treat others. If you look at your weaknesses and your sins, as if they are the things that should not be there.
And you hate them and you want to destroy them, and you do it by denying them. You are in the classic state that we all get caught up in, and that is living in a time of freedom and love and acceptance and blocking it and not allowing it to enter into us. What a tragedy. Not to believe that I’m loved in my imperfection, not to believe that I’m forgiven before I even do anything wrong. Not to believe that the love of God and the acceptance of God is the transformation stuff. It’s the energy of transformation.
It will change you permanently. The other is fear and hatred of a part of me, and I try to crush it and destroy it. And if I do that, I live in a dual world and I never find peace. That’s the scary part. So repentance is God’s work, our work. Open your eyes.
Accept your human nature. God created it that way. He wanted it to be that way. He wants you to be indebted, in a sense, to him because of his love and how it changed you. And then you will start doing that to other people. And once you love people in their imperfection, watch them change.
It’s phenomenal. Condemn them and judge them. Try to get them to face it. It doesn’t. So there’s a great, great lesson as we begin this time of reflecting on the work of Jesus. Keep in mind what he did when he died on that cross.
He took away the sting of sin. It no longer is an obstacle to our being with Him. In fact, it’s the key to experiencing his love. Father, we pray that we might have the same experience as the disciples as we go through the journey that you had with them this liturgical year. We want you to open our eyes so that we can really see how close you are to us, but most especially the enormous gift of your love, in spite of our weaknesses, in spite of our sins, so that we can feel this affirming, transforming love that changes us and brings us not only a change of heart, but a capacity to change the way we treat one another, the way we respond to evil in one another, the way we respond to evil in the world. So your gift is peace, oneness, unity, Open our heart to the way in which you’ve given us, so that we might find it, experience it, and share it with one another.
And we ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show, Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program is archived and available on our website, pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com and available anytime, anywhere and for free on our podcast, Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued support.
Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher Produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2020.
