THURSDAY, SEVENTH WEEK OF EASTER
1 Pt 2: 2-5, 9-12; Ps 100: 2-5; Mk 10: 46-52
THE CHANGE THAT GOD DESIRES
The perfect example of perseverance in prayer is the widow (Luke 18). Second to her, we have blind Bartimaeus, who stays put on his course of prayer against the chiding of the public. Even though people told him to be silent, and asked him to stifle his cries, he did not stop; at the end, we have him receiving the Lord’s healing touch, something he prayed desperately for! His ‘means’ was looked down on by others, but it bothered him the least, for he knew that the consequence of his action would be beneficial only to him. He was, so to say, elevated from a physical disadvantage to wellness and wholeness.
St. Peter, speaks to us in the same vein, from a spiritual perspective. He tells us in the day’s first reading, that God elevated us from slavery and abuse of sin and pain, from being no people to divine Son-ship. Believers are now part of a chosen race, transformed into a royal priesthood, thanks to Christ’s redeeming sacrifice which effected the advent of salvation.
But this transformation comes with a demand: like Bartimaeus’ throwing off his ‘cloak’, and going towards Jesus, the Gospel passage exhorts us to throw off the ‘cloak of our past sinful habits’. In correspondence with Paul, whom we hear in Romans 6:6, and 2 Corinthians 5:17, Peter urges us today to renew ourselves – to shed off the old man and to be a new creation in Christ. A change is insisted from our past inordinate way of life, from the passions of our flesh, and we are instructed by the head of the Apostles, to guard our soul against the passions of the flesh. When we walk the Christian way, with the sight of our faith, like the regenerated Bartimaeus, our lives and our souls would so correspond to God’s heart that our deeds would seek only the glory of God. Then would the Lord’s word, “I am the light of the world, he who follows me will have the light of life” take flesh in us.
Response: Come before him, singing for joy.
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