Soul Purpose
Luke 5:27-32 (Gospel
on 8-Mar-2014)
How do we comprehend the people we meet? Do we create an
image of people based on the work they do, the company they keep, the choices
they make, the Deity they worship, or by ‘getting to know them’? It is very
common and easy to build a picture of a person’s nature and attitude, and that
eventually becomes our opinion about them. This way we make of ourselves as
self-proclaimed judges. We do not give a chance to know the actual person but
rather focus only on his / her reputation. Nobody in the world is perfect.
Jesus of Nazareth, The Lord and Savior of the world shows us how one should see
‘the good’ which is in every person. That good is seeded in us at the time of
our conception, by God Almighty himself. We are all tuned to God from our
beginning because we are all from God.
Jesus looked at Levi
and said “follow me”. Most times we only ‘see’ people and in their situations.
We rarely ‘look’ into their situations. What good it is to only use our eyes to
see the world; everything and everyone in it, and not use our heart and mind to
look into the essence of that person? Whether it was the leper, the adulterous,
the blind, the gentile, the oppressor or His very own, Jesus looked into the
very soul of the person and identified the chord that bound Him with them,
through the make of His Father.
Rome was the greatest
persecutor of Israel and Caesar was every Jew’s worst nightmare. Levi
therefore, was hated and despised by his fellow Jewish brethren, for being a
tax collector, a loyalist of the Roman authority and a servant of Caesar. But
unlike everyone else who was evading this Jew; labeled as a ‘traitor’ of
Israel, Jesus invited Him into His life and ministry. To understand this let us
understand how Jesus chose to mingle with such people and make them feel one
with Him. Meals establish Jewish
identity; they function to differentiate competing Jewish groups from one
another and between Jews and Gentiles. Meals play a central role in Jews and
Judaism, and to understand them is perhaps the most direct route to
understanding the core values of Jewish tradition and its practitioners. In the heart of such culture, Jesus ate and drank with
people such as Levi, who on the other hand were not welcomed among the
households of their very own.
My friends, the
healer always seeks those who need healing, if otherwise, he is not sincere to
his vocation. Which is why Jesus said to them in reply, 'It is not those
that are well who need the doctor, but the sick. I have come to call not the
upright but sinners to repentance.' The Pharisees only saw the sin of
fornication and adultery in the adulterous, but Jesus saw her immense faith and
burning desire for a sincere conversion. They saw her wretchedness but He saw
her love as she washed His feet with tears and dried them with her hair. Let us
all therefore choose to be like Christ in our outlook towards people. Let us
not be quick to make an opinion about someone and then later regret having
pushed them far away from our lives. Even if we are acquainted with a sinner,
may we never forget that ‘every saint has a past and every sinner has a
future.’
No comments:
Post a Comment