Posted by The WORD in other words (2018) by Fr Roderick Salazar SVD – Christ the King Seminary, Quezon City
Tuesday 16th Week in Ordinary Time
Anna Quindlen is describing her conversation with a homeless street person in Coney Island, New York. Most of the time, he stayed at the boardwalk, facing the ocean, even when it got cold and he had to wear his newspapers after he read them. Why? Staring out at the beautiful ocean before them, he said, “Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view.”
What a unique perspective! To go to a shelter or a hospital and get some food into his stomach, a roof over his head, and a bed to stretch and sleep in would surely have been welcome. But then he would lose the view of the ocean, which he was not willing to forego.
Jesus, in today’s Gospel, surely had a different view. About relationships, about life, about love, about God. Jesus was not insulting his mother by denying His relationship with her. He was expanding it, extending it, and raising it to a level beyond the merely human.
To the ordinary Jew in His time, only those who shared Israel’s culture and beliefs were family, friends, neighbours. Jesus taught his contemporaries then and us today that in the family of God, ties and bonds are not limited to blood, and should not be confined to religion or race. Already sharing a common humanity, all men and women become linked to a common divinity when everyone follows, as Jesus did, the Father’s will.
It is not an easy thing to do – God’s will. But there is no other way to heaven. As Jesus the Way, the Truth, the Life said, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6)
I pray I learn His way of living and loving by looking with His view.
