October 3, 2015 - Saturday

Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.
Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong,
and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something,
so that no human being might boast before God. (1 Corinthians 1:26-29 NABRE)

Paul has this to tell us: Human wisdom (what I think of as cleverness), power, noble birth, strength, fame: None of these matters to God. And so we ought to ask: Why do they matter to us?

Rather, so no one has the right to boast before God, look who Jesus calls "brothers" and to whom God reveals himself: the simple, the weak, the poor and common, the foolish, the lowly and despised, those who count for nothing. And so we ought to consider: Why do we spurn these brothers of Jesus?

The gospel of Luke tells us that: At that very moment [Jesus] rejoiced [in] the holy Spirit and said, “I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will. (Luke 10:21)


Today, I will seek to be a better brother to Jesus rather than to pursue the empty aims of this world.


Saint Theodora Guérin, whose life, Pope Saint John Paul II said in 2006, "is a testimony that everything is possible with God and for God," pray for us.