17When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
Jesus invites us to a new way of living; a new way of hope over despair, of peace over violence, of justice over abuse, of forgiveness over hatred, of love over selfishness. He calls especially those who precisely have not been living fully in His ways; He calls us to a journey of faith. In this journey, He presents to us His way to live life, that of placing our hope entirely on Him, to be fully aware of ourselves, our strengths as well as weaknesses, and to constantly choose against sin. When we fail and get disappointed by the weight of our sins, we fall. But He gave us His example to stand up against the crushing weight of the cross upon His shoulders and to walk on. In this light, Jesus shows us that the way to fulfilling the Father's Will is not to be defeated by the weight of our crosses and our crumbling in our weaknesses but rather, it is to stand up and keep walking on each time we fail, we fall, trusting at all times in His Mercy, Providence and Faithfulness.
In His public ministry, Jesus was more often than not found in the company of sinners, those judged and condemned and the outcast of society. Instead of keeping Himself within the circle of the "learned", "holy", and "righteous", He mingled His Perfection with the imperfections of sinners, with our own imperfections. Instead of upholding His Godly presence among people, He weaved His Divinity into our humanity in total humility. Jesus sees pass our imperfections and sets His gaze on the inner good that God created in each and every one of us when He created us in His image and likeness. I'd like to believe that Jesus, in asking us to imitate Him, is asking us to be welcoming of those whom society treats disrespectfully, to accept those who do not share the same life attitudes and values as ourselves and thus, we cannot see eye to eye with, and to be patient with those who infuriate us with their stubborn, self-centred and inconsiderate behaviours. Also, He is affirming us that no matter who we are, what our lives are like, He, the God who sits and eats in the company of sinners, will also be close to us because He, too, wants to bring us to salvation.
Being humanly weak, we can only imitate Christ in so far as God provides us with the graces we need; alone, we can never succeed. So, let us pray, asking God for the many graces we need to desire more earnestly to imitate His way of living, to go to Him for pardon and strength to pick ourselves up when we fall into sin, and to eliminate division between ourselves and those we have branded as being "different from us", having "no common interest" and "contrasting lifestyles" etc so that we can grow in sensitivity towards the needs of all peoples and we do not contribute to greater divisions, which society has already put in place to marginalise and discriminate.
25 March 2011, Friday
12.55am
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