1st JULY,2015. WEDNESDAY IN WEEK 13

1.Genesis 21:5,8-20

2. Matthew 8:28-34

REFLECTIONS AND MEDITATIONS

Trusting in the Providence of God.

From the first reading,  it took time on my part to reflect on the ways of God. God’s ways are not human ways. Whenever I try to reflect on this reading from the book of Genesis I really become perplexed on how God the merciful, the protector of life can order Abraham to slaughter his own spring, Isaack and abandon a slave woman, Hagar according to what God told him to do. In our molarity we could not possibly accept either decision ( banishing his illegitimate son or slaying his true-born son) following a mandate from God. But Abraham was following  what he thought to be right. This in fact is the basic rule of the conscience: We should judge every decision in the light of what we know.

Abraham judged what he should do, in the light of contemporary custom. During that time as it is well known, infant sacrifice was widespread as was polygamy. However in the case of Hagar, a slave woman, Abraham seems to violate another contemporary custom that held that once a slave woman was accepted as the wife, was to be taken into a good hospitality, but in the opposite, Abraham seems to violate the law of Hospitality that obliged him to protect the newly welcomed wife into his community! How could  he in his conscience drive out Hagar and her son? May be in the light of Sarah’s insistence that Isaac is his rightful heir!

Clearly, not everything in the Bible is to be followed literally. In faith and trust Abraham did all that he believed God was asking of him; and he would gradually learn from Life experience how to move on from his earlier convictions. That is how God’s providence guides our lives. At the end of the story we see and learn how God  provides for Hagar and Ishmael, for His providence is universal. God’s care for the poor is perhaps the basic moral of the story.

From today’s Gospel, we hear Jesus casting out demons from the wild man whom they had possessed. The demons begged Jesus to get into a nearby heard of pigs. As soon as the y enter the pigs, the whole herd rushes headlong over a cliff and drowns in the lake below. Nevertheless, the pigs might be ritually unclean, but they had economic value as being regarded in our time. The purpose of the story of course is to focus on Jesus’ power to liberate people from evil influences that held them enslaved. The stampede of pigs just coloured and added an extra flair of the drama to the tale.

From the gospel, it is striking that after Jesus had done that, the people of the region asked him to quite to the neighbourhood. It might have been expected that  they would have wanted Jesus, the man who brought freedom to the enslaved, to stay among them and share with them sometimes. May in the region there were other people who could benefit with Jesus healing mission, in this context people seem to have feared that the mission could have made a lot of demands on them. We too can be tempted to ask Jesus to leave our neighbourhood, to leave our lives. We sometimes want to keep him at a distance. Jesus today teaches us the lesson that we also need to go to those people who have displaced, who even do not have somebody to care for them. If we welcome the Lord in our lives, thus we will understand and discover that he gives strength to respond to the challenging call of his presence and in responding to that call we too will find a greater fullness of life.