Scripture:
Amos 7:12-15
Ephesians 1:3-14
Mark 6:7-13
Reflection:
Today’s responsorial psalm proclaims four God-like elements that lead to glory and salvation: kindness, truth, justice, and peace.
Let us reflect on the ultimate outcomes in our lives if we somehow agreed that those four elements were the most important criteria to judge ourselves by.
Take, for instance, a difficult conflict with your teenage son. Later in life, when the adolescent reflects on that incident with you, how would he rate your commitment to kindness, honest frankness, courageous and thoughtful justice, and unrelenting efforts to help bring comfortable peace to your relationship? And, from your role-modeling, how much of that has rubbed off on him as core principles for the rest of his life and his relationships with his own family and friends?
For a bigger example, consider a war among nations. A serious thinker must ask, “What is the end game of this war?” Is a nation’s (and a nation’s leaders’) view of justice a definable and defensible endgame? Or would you have to call the conflict more ‘revenge’ than ‘justice’? Are war plans for protecting non-combatants with kindness as powerful and as complete as the plans for destroying arsenals and offensive forces? How much of the core reasoning behind a war is based on defensible truth rather than raw power and sociopathic cruelty? Finally, if the end game is not unequivocally stated as long-term peace for the people on both sides of the conflict, what on earth could a justified conclusion possibly look like?
A meditation: How God-like might I try to be? How seriously have I identified and considered the elements of truth and justice for the challenge I face right now? Am I being the kindest I can be, and is peace a genuine aim?
Jack Dermody is the editor of the CrossRoads bulletin for the Passionist Alumni Association and a member of the Migration Commission for Holy Cross Province. He lives in Glendale, Arizona.