Scripture:
1 John 3:22-4:6
Matthew 4:12-17, 23-25
Reflection:
Who among us has not paused to access major intersections of our lives . . . after high school plans, marriage, entering the seminary or religious community, a job we took, the neighborhood we chose as home? Looking back years later, in a prayerful moment, we may have seen the hand of God in each big decision, realizing the Spirit guided us even when we didn’t know it.
The opposite can be true as well. We all make bad choices, even when they look like very fine choices at the time. We rush into a career/vocation that proves unsatisfying, we seek financial security only to find ourselves in an ethical cesspool, we marry someone who we failed to see had a destructive mental disorder, or an addiction to sex, gambling, or substances.
Our faith offers us guidelines for each decision we make, from what we have for breakfast, to how we spend our money, to who we choose as friends. St. John’s first letter encourages us: “Beloved, do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they being to God, because many false prophets have gone our into the world.”
A word used by spiritual guides to test the spirits is discernment. Great mystics like St. Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Merton focus much attention on the discernment of spirits. Why? Because there is a battle going on within us. We want to go one way, but something tells us to go the opposite way.
What criteria do we use to know the right decision? St John says, “This is how you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God.”
Acknowledging Jesus Christ come in the flesh leads us to put on the mind of Christ. How would my brother Jesus understand and handle this situation? Thinking like Christ means stripping ourselves of pride, of clinging to money, possessions, status, and honors. It means looking around to consider what someone else needs first, to see the impact our choices have on family, co-workers, the poor, the refugee, the innocent.
St. Ignatius assures us that the Spirit gives a feeling of “consolation” when we make a good choice. This gift of consolation is an assurance that, a best we can, we are in alignment with God’s desires for us. Consolation provides the chief characteristics of followers of Jesus: inner joy and peace.
After John the Baptist infuriated the political big wigs of his day, he was arrested. In today’s Gospel Jesus gets the news about his cousin’s imprisonment and moves out of his hometown of Nazareth to launch his life’s work of preaching and healing. He evidently wasted no time pleading for people to repent, as John the Baptist had done. Then, in a passage omitted in the middle section of today’s Gospel, he rounded up a couple of buddies to help him and he started to heal anyone who needed healing: the sick, those in pain, the possessed, lunatics, paralytics. In our time it would be like a someone walking among those living in tents and under expressways in every city in America to heal them one by one.
Jesus was living his vocation, what his Father wanted him to do when he got up in the morning. Each of us are given the grace we need to discern what God wants us to do. Some are called to marriage, others to religious or non-vowed single life or widowhood. Some heal in health care settings, others are teachers, UPS drivers, factory workers, street vendors, craftsmen and women, tailors, writers, entertainers, homemakers, accountants, and on and on.
We all must weigh marriage/religious community, family, and community responsibilities against a desire to perform noble compassionate deeds. Some may have yearnings to do special or noted, like another Jimmy Carter or Mother Theresa. But in prayerful discernment, God may lead us to a much more modest, unnoticed job caring for a grandchild with a disability or finishing our education to be high school teacher while working a low wage job to pay for food, shelter, and tuition.
Regardless of the choices we face each day, our faith provides a context for knowing what is God’s will for us. Praying for the grace to know what the Spirit is telling us will, in time, lead us to what is best for us and the ones we love. We will experience joy and peace. In this we must trust. “This is how we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of deceit,” as St. John wisely tells us today.
Jim Wayne is a board member of the Passionist Solidarity Network (PSN), and author of The Unfinished Man. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.