Wednesday of the 4th Week of Eastertide
Acts 12:24-13:5 | Psalm 66(67):2-3,5-6,8 | John 12:44-50
If anyone hears my words and does not keep them faithfully,
it is not I who shall condemn him,
since I have come not to condemn the world,
but to save the world.
He who rejects me and refuses my words has his judge already:
the word itself that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day. (John 12:47-48)
In my consulting work, I sometimes have the unpleasant task of telling my client that their inspired idea or grand plan Just Won’t Work:
That new filesystem with spanking new control software won’t be worth a hill of beans, when a power glitch crashes the customer’s database server, and it gets stuck at boot time trying to fix itself, while your engineer’s halfway across the world.
That 100Mbps network pipe to your data collection server won’t help when you have 200 clients pumping 1Mbps of data each. (I actually had to write this simple equation on a whiteboard, to make someone see that what he said could be done was physically impossible.)
Hard disk died? What happened to the backups I kept telling you guys to set up since day one? Sorry, I’m not Jesus; your data’s gone!
And then I get the Evil Eye for making them look like fools, for torpedoing a young engineer’s dream project, for not being a miracle worker.
It usually takes a while for them to realize that I’m not condemning them. I’m just trying to save them from themselves.
✞ ✞ ✞ ✞ ✞
Every one of us probably remembers a time in our childhood when we turned a deaf ear to our parents’ advice, and ended up both regretting it…and blaming them for our misery.
Jesus has been on the receiving end of that too, millions of times over.
As Catholics, we have the benefit of receiving His Word of Love and Life through an unbroken apostolic heritage. If we continue to turn away from that Word, to live our lives in hedonistic bliss, that Word would be our literal downfall at the end of days.
We’ve also been charged to spread that Word to others around us. When we keep the commandments that we’ve heard, rest assured that others will notice, and perhaps come to believe too.
And if we don’t, it’ll be one hell of an afterlife.
Lord, You have given us Your Word out of love for all mankind. Help us to take that Word in, and meditate upon it, and live it daily, so that all who know us may some day come to know You too. Amen.