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Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 23 February 2014


Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 23 February 2014

7th Sunday of the year

I remember a rather amusing doggerel poem based on the words of St Matthew’s Gospel for this Sunday, I’ve discovered that its attributed to Charles Baron Bowen and English Judge who died in 1894, it goes like this:

“The rain it raineth on the just

And also on the unjust fella;

But chiefly on the just, because

The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.”

Many of us possibly feel like that when faced with the command of Jesus to ‘be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect’, to love ones enemies and pray for persecutors. Something inside me certainly struggles with that command, what about restitution and justice, one cannot let the evii doer just get away with things can we?

I don’t think for one moment Jesus or Leviticus for that matter means we are to passively accept evil in our world , there is a hint in our first reading about reproval suggesting that there are mechanisms in life and law to deal with situations and people who have done evil to others. All of us accept the necessity of law and contract for getting on in life. But Matthew shows us Jesus calling those who are God’s children to move beyond these concerns and sow a seed of ‘divine love’ within the context of our world That certainly echoes what we read in Leviticus, ‘love your neighbour as yourself’.

What does this mean for us? In a way it takes us back to that image of the imbalance between ‘the just and unjust fella’. We know that in our world the have not’s outnumber the have’s. In a sense those of us in the Western part of the Globe are part of the unjust fella, most of us have more resources, riches, opportunities than those in the Global South for instance. Our poverty cannot equate to the images of starving refugees, even less the horrors of a society like North Korea.

Paul reminds us that our Baptism and confirmation make us living Temples of God, the Spirit dwells in us. That immediately makes a real demand on us, we are to go beyond our comfort zone, trying to forgive and reconcile as Christ did. Why must we? Because that is our vocation, we belong to Christ, we have to become his presence in society, to become the ‘just fella’s’ of the world!

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