FRIDAY OF THE SEVENTEENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME - 2021

DAILY HOLY MASS READINGS

The word of the Lord remains forever:
What is this word?
It is the Good News that has been brought to you. 1 PET 1:25

LEVITICUS 23:1,4-11,15-16,27,34-37 ©

My Soul's Beloved,

Feast days are important - the Church knows this - and this is why she celebrates so many important days throughout the liturgical year. It keeps the memory of God's goodness, mercy, grace, and abounding love alive in us. God Himself gives Moses elaborate instructions on how to celebrate the festivals all through the year.

God desires us to come together as a community, as one body to honor and worship You and to offer to Him the one, holy, perfect, and most acceptable Sacrifice. We are invited to unite and offer our own joys and sorrows with Your holy Sacrifice. In this way, we make the offering of our own lives pleasing to Him as well. 

Both private worship and community worship are important. You ask us to go in our room, shut the door and pray to our heavenly Father in secret. But as God's holy people we are also commanded to assemble together as the family of God and worship Him. Here on earth, we are given a foretaste of the wedding banquet that will never end.

PSALM 81:3-6,10-11 ©

My Soul's Beloved,

The glorious truth is this - we have You as our Lord, our God, our Savior, our Redeemer, our Messiah, our Friend, our Brother, and our Spouse and this means that the less we rely on our own inadequate resources and the more heavily we lean on You the greater will be our ability to face trials without being crushed with anxiety, fear, sadness, and despair.

Life is hard. We live in the valley of the shadow of death. We constantly battle forces that are beyond our strength to overcome and we don't have to. Those with faith have heaven on their side battling on their behalf. The victory is won. The Cross has triumphed. The Kingdom of God is here. Alleluia! Amen! Alleluia!

MATTHEW 13:54-58 ©

My Soul's Beloved,

The Good News is a Person. Truth is a Person. Love is a Person. The Eternal Word is the fullness of love and truth. 'And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.'

The nations of the world and their people are much like those of Your own hometown who knew some facts about You, about Your parents Mary and Joseph, they knew Your relatives, they knew Joseph was a carpenter by trade and were dismissive of You when in fact they were clueless about who You truly were.

Today, in a world where information is readily available at our fingertips, all too often fail we fail to seek the truth for ourselves and having found it, consider the whole world well lost in order to possess it. Many listen to half-baked truths about You, they are misinformed and believe the lies that are told of You. They have erroneous ideas of You and to a great extent, we are responsible for giving the world a false image of You because we fail to live authentic Christian lives. 

The people of Your hometown rejected You because they were too bigoted, to see beyond the periphery of their own narrow vision and the same is true for many of us. We have a distorted view of You and of the faith, we are ignorant of Your Word, we are cafeteria Catholics quite happy to pick and choose what pleases our spiritual palate and discard that which we find difficult to practice. Our faith is so weak it vapourises when ugly scandals become public knowledge and we use them as an excuse to abandon the barque of Peter when in truth our lackluster faith needs no pretext to fold like a pack of cards in the wind. Miracles are nonexistent in our lives because we lack a robust faith where miracles are the norm. ‘A prophet is only despised in his own country and in his own house’, and he did not work many miracles there because of their lack of faith.