Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 9 June 2013

Fr Robin Gibbons

Tenth Sunday of the Year

The first reading and gospel talk about the return to life of a widow’s son through God’s response to heartfelt prayer. We can read into this a number of things, the plight of the widow and orphan as marginalized people, but nevertheless the little ones so beloved of God, ignored by normal society it is only through recourse to God and those who are God’s disciples that provides the answer to what might have been a calamity, death and poverty.

Then there is the deep reminder to the rest of us that it is in God’s gracious love we find our answers, it is the prayer of the psalmist, ‘The Lord listened and had pity. The Lord came to my help.’ That is also a reminder of the necessity of prayer as part of a relationship with God, we too mourn, feel lost, have those moments of deep pain like that of the two widows, grieving over the apparent loss of their son and in rawness asking God directly to help them.

We need to get back to this type of connection with God, too often in contemporary life human beings are sometimes led to believe that they will one day find the answers to everything and truly conquer the now unknown. The danger there is the insidious sin of pride coupled with arrogance. It can lead to a very selfish approach to life which views religion and belief in God as an ancient superstition that has no place in a rational society.

But in our reflection on the readings today we discover a corrective, God does reach out to us. Paul writes about his vocation to become a disciple of Christ and does it through a very strange path, he talks about it in terms of God’s revelation and grace. In one sense Paul’s vocation is a journey from death to life, to discover the God who knows each of us, even from the moment when we began to grow in our mother’s womb.

This is a God of relationship and love, who at our baptism gives us the promise of Christ’s gift of risen life for ever. We too are called like Paul to live out the Good News, to preach it in our lives by acts of loving kindness, but we must never forget the call of God who has chosen us to be those who reveal Christ to others that they may know ’God has visited his people’.

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.