Ad Jesum per Mariam

You Are Invited to Participate In the Plan of God!

You Are Invited to Participate In the Plan of God! St. Augustine was asked what is time? Time of planting, a time for harvesting, a time for dying, a time for birth and more. When asked what time is, St. Augustine has a thought. When someone doesn’t ask him about time, he says, he knows what time is. He continues, however, when ultimately asked what time is, his reply is I do not know. Two Types of Time For those over the centuries that have reflected upon time, they have identified two types of time. Chronos refers to clock time, or the passing of time minute by minute. There is a second type of time, and it refers to Time within the Bible. Chairos (sometimes spelt Kairos) is special. It means God’s time or “the right time”. Hear more within the Homily! For centuries, time was envisioned as a very big wheel with seven spokes. The wheel rotates. A way to envision this is a big circle. It starts, rotates and returns to the start point again. The Homily speaks of the significance of this image. Abraham is invited by God to leave his lands and follow the Lord to a land God will show him . . . Israel. He surrenders to God and is led by God. He lets time be directed by God. Jesus Asks His Disciples . . . In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks His disciples who do you say I am? Peters responds for all disciples . . . identifying Jesus as the Christ. He is the fulfillment of all expectations of Israel. All events across all time were directed to this fulfillment … the coming of Our Lord, His death, and His Resurrection. We are all invited to participate in the plan of God. How? The Homily informs us! Listen to this Meditation Media. Listen to: You Are Invited to Participate In the Plan of God! ----------------------------- Image: God the Father and the Holy Spirit: Italian Artist: Pompeo Batoni: (l. 1708-1787) ----------------------------- Gospel Reading: Luke: 9: 18-22 First Reading: ECCL: 3: 1-11

Broadcast on:: 01 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

The Lord be with you, reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke. Once when Jesus was praying in solitude and the disciples were with him, he asked them, "Who do the crowds say that I am?" They said in reply, "John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others, one of the ancient prophets has arisen." Then he said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter said in reply, "The Christ of God." He rebuked them and directed them not to tell these to anyone. He said, "The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised." The Gospel of the Lord. One day, sent to Augustine of Hippo, was asked, "What is time as we here in the first reading is about time? Time of planting, time of harvesting, time of dying, the time of death and time?" So when sent to Augustine was asked, "What is time?" His response was, "When you ask me about time, when you don't ask me about time, I know what time is." But the moment you ask me, "What is time? I don't know." Over the centuries, time, those that have reflected on time, they talk of two types of time. There is a time that they call chronos from where chronology, the word chronology, the word "watch" comes from. It is actually time counting from one minute to the next, from one day to the next, from one year to the next. It is a time that you can count one tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, that's the time that is known as chronos. But the Bible, the scripture, uses a different way of time, is the time in the scriptures is chyros, which means fulfillment. It's a time, it's the optimal moment when what has been planned by God finds its fulfillment. Text-place is revealed, comes to the manifestation of what the first reading says, what God has hidden from the heart of man since the beginning is revealed in the chyros, the optimal time of God. And you will see that in all the ancient cultures, in all the cultures of the world, time was understood in terms of a will, like a bicycle wheel, a big wheel, that had seven spokes to eat. So a wheel, what the wheel does, it rotates, it goes up and comes back to the same point. So this is how the events of the world take place. So the chyros in the beginning of his book, the one we are reading today, he says there is nothing new on earth because it has already appeared and then it will appear, it will come again and again and again. But there is a difference with the understanding of time, beginning with Israel, a break from that understanding of time where it rotates, everything there's nothing new that happened, it begins with Israel when God called Abraham to say, "Abraham, leave your country or to a country where I will show you." He is invited to an unknown time, an unknown place, what is already known that is going to happen, Abraham begins for the first time to go into the unknown, to go into the hands of God and to let time be directed by God, and this became the vocation of Abraham. From you will come descendants as many as the sons of world they is. From you or the nations of the world will bless themselves. From you there is a future different from the future that we already know with the will, it's directed towards something that has not happened. It is directed towards to an event that has been planned by God, and today in the gospel we find Jesus asks the disciples, "Who do you say, who do people say that I am?" They say, "Oh, some say you are Elijah, some say you are John the Baptist, or one of the prophets that we are supposed to come." And Jesus says, "And you, who do you say that you are? I am." And the response of Peter standing for all of us, Christians, for all the disciples, he says, "You are the Messiah of God. You are theointed one of God." Which means literally Messiah means the one, the fulfillment of all the expectations of Israel. Which means all time, everything that was before was directed to this. It was directed to the coming of the fulfillment of the plans of God in the Messiah. Who is Jesus Christ? And then he says, for the first time that the son of man in the Messiah must die, because in that will, the original will we have talked about, everything happens. There is the movement is the best copulation, death, best copulation, death. But this time, this Messiah says, "No, after death there is resurrection." A thing that was not there before. So all time is directed towards the resurrection, the life of the fullness of God. That's where time is directed. And all of us as Christians, our day-to-day circumstances, must give us a vocation that draws us to the resurrection. Some of us, among us here, may be going through hard times of life, times of decision about health, times of decision about family, times of decision about it. And sometimes this time must be hard, must be. And the temptation is to say, "Okay, this is what has happened, and it will happen, it has happened for many." But it's a time of discovering our vocation into the new future, in which God will be met in his fullness in the resurrection. So all of us here are invited to a vocation, a vocation that literally we participate in the plan of God. Today we celebrate Saint Vincent de Paul, who in his own time he saw suffering, he saw death, he saw all other evil things that happened, and made a decision in his life to save the poor, to save the orphan, to save the widow, and that work continues until today. The question is that each one of us have been given time. What is our vocation with that time? [silence]