If God cares for a sparrow falling from the sky, how much more does he care for us? I wonder, when we examine our conscience, how often do we consider this commandment of Jesus and reflect on the hold ‘fear’ might have on my life and the witness this gives to others?Īnd why are we called “not to be afraid”? Because in the eyes of God each individual person is of infinite value, made in God’s image and likeness, and loved with an eternal love. He simply says it commands it it is not optional – “Do Not Be Afraid.” He doesn’t qualify it in any way, and he offers no exceptions to it. When Jesus says, “Do not be afraid” in this Gospel, he says it as a commandment. If our relationship with God is based on fear, then it too is unhealthy and will never lead to the joy Jesus came to share with us. We know from our own experience that any relationship based on fear cannot be healthy and will inevitably fail. Death, judgement and hell fill us with terror and our lives become permeated with a sense of sin, guilt and shame. Is it any wonder, then, that three times in almost as many sentences Jesus uses the phrase, “ do not be afraid” in today’s Gospel? It is a phrase repeated 365 times in the Bible – almost as if God says these words to us every single day of the year!Īnd yet, we do fear. I feel sad, sometimes, when I hear learned Christians claim that scientific knowledge and religious belief are incompatible, and those who think that the beauty of the story of creation in the Book of Genesis is at odds with evolution or cosmology.įor me, everything I know of our Universe, and every new discovery we make in science only increases my faith and assures me more and more that the love of God is even greater, more personal and more wondrous than I can ever fathom. In the immensity of the Universe we are so tiny as to be utterly insignificant, yet in the eyes of God we are the ones who are vast and possess a dignity which is incalculable. As the same preface continues, “… yet you formed us in your own image, and set us over the whole world in all of its wonder…” In all of God’s creation, in the vastness of a universe beyond our imagination, we are chosen and invited to share in the very life of God. There is, I think, something incredibly comforting in this Gospel. And, as the Gospel concludes, “ We are worth more than hundreds of sparrows.” Just try to imagine: The God who “ laid the foundations of our universe, and who arranged the changing of times and seasons” (as one of our Sunday Mass Prefaces says), is aware of even a sparrow falling from the sky. Every hair on or head has been counted by our God.” In a cosmos as vast as ours the words of Jesus become even more amazing and awesome. “Not a sparrow falls from the sky without our God knowing and caring about it. Stars, galaxies and as yet undiscovered forces and objects, easily outnumber all the grains of sand in all the deserts, and on all of the beaches of the world – and this is just ‘our’ visible Universe! There may be far, far more beyond what we can see.Ĭonsidering our present knowledge of the Universe, how much more awesome and wonder-full are the words of our Gospel today. Today, we know that the Universe we inhabit is almost fourteen billion years old and so vast in scale that numbers or systems of measurement become meaningless. Even in the small and narrow world they inhabited, that God would care for his people that much was beyond understanding. When Jesus, in today’s Gospel spoke about the “ hairs of our head being numbered by God, and not even a sparrow falling from the sky without God’s knowledge…”, it would have seemed awesome to those listening to him. In all scientific endeavours our boundaries of knowledge are being pushed back at frightening speeds, with our cosmos ever revealing more of its vastness and wonder. Communication from one corner of the earth to the other is instant, cheap and available to all. For most in our world education and literacy is guaranteed. Today we cannot even imagine a world that small. Scientific knowledge hardly existed, with a mix of religion, superstition and ignorance used to explain both the wonderful and traumatic experiences of life. Communication over any distance was by sea and it was slow and unreliable. Most ‘ordinary’ people could barely read and write. Travel was difficult and mostly used for trade. When Jesus walked the tracks and trails of Israel the world was a very small place. Gospel Reflection for Sunday June 25th 2023
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