Reflection – Dr Nathan Leber

God at Our Centre

At the end of the Beatitudes, Jesus says these words, “Rejoice and be glad for great is your reward in the Kingdom of Heaven.” This is the accompanying response, the desired outcome for those who suffer injustices on behalf of the faith and in Jesus’ name blessed. The Gospel for this Sunday has a similar message – there will be trials and persecutions for the faithful….and yet we choose this anyway. We should not be surprised at the frustration, anger, disappointment and even despair which is felt throughout our Church and the world. It is hard to feel happy and rejoice when we are feeling so low. Yet, all this apocalyptic language reminds us that we need to look to the glory of God…to the greater glory of God. Mortal concerns are fleeting, a necessity before we are enlightened to realise that God is our centre. Like old theories of the Sun revolving around the Earth, we need to break free from this ego-centric way of thinking. We orbit the Godhead, not the other way around. Realising this is liberating. It means we no longer seek for more as we know that God provides all and is irreplaceable – Jesus spoke about this. We can then bask in His light, the Sun of Justice, and live forever in His glow, the source of all love and healing. Finding God in all things is about seeing what He is trying to tell us. Listening to the what the Spirit, that Holy Spirit which dwells within, is saying to us. God does speaks through hardships, yet He is not the cause. In the accidents and incidents of life, God is there. He is waiting for us to realise, forget our foolish self-importance, humble ourselves, and wonder at Him again. We must rediscover God through awe and wonder – through the beauty and goodness that still infuses our world. We must see Him as infinitely greater than us and not to confuse God within our own centricity. This is where many errors occur. We stopped looking up and started looking in. We forgot about our relationship to and with the divine – the very thing that Christ came to show us – the divinity within our humanity.  Christ himself knew something about suffering. His own people, the Jews, rejected him, themselves living as a conquered people under the might of the Romans. As a baby he had survived the Massacre of the Innocents and fled as a refugee. His death was humiliating and agonising yet paled in comparison by the rejection of his friends, first Judas then Peter. When we think of it, there has never been an age without war, power, strife and disaster. Jesus is describing his time, the time before him, and certainly our time…and maybe this is the point. We don’t need the threat of a looming ‘end of days’ to spark a change of heart – or at least we shouldn’t. Endurance is the key – a steady, unwavering belief in God and the faith, in the message of the Gospels and the words of Jesus. As Jesus says, these days will lead us to our testimony, and not just any defence, but one which comes from the Spirit – powerful and wisdom-filled.  

Dr Nathan Leber