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Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 20 July 2014


The terrible news of the airline disaster in Ukraine with 298 dead, 80 of them children and the largest group from the Netherlands, with ten British people. This brutal and violent act brings up a tremendous sense of grief, loss, outrage and anger not least for those who have lost loved ones. The pictures themselves are horrible, images of violent and sudden death, it is a tragedy, like all other tragedies of loss, injustice, of cruelty of sin. This alas is the work of what Jesus describes as the weeds in the field, those children of the evil one!

It is at times like this that we find it too much to take in, numbed by daily acts of violence, the bombings in Gaza, the horrors of Syria and Afghanistan, the list just goes on and on. Yet something so immediate and violent like this makes us sit up. How can our scriptures help us? Can we hear the voice of Jesus this Sunday? Can we find something to help those innocents caught up in the evils of violence? Will the voice of those innocent ones reach the compassionate ear of God?

This is where we have to trust the deep history of our religious community, the experiences of our ancestors in faith. All we see, hear, experience has in some way happened before. So we listen: the reading from Wisdom reminds us that whatever we think, God is lenient with us all, and seeks ways to forgive us our sins. But this is no easy option, justice, mercy and kindness are inextricably mixed.

Saint Paul tells us to listen to the Spirit, to let the Spirit guide our lives and hearts and so become part of what we do, for as he suggests if we seek God, search our hearts, then we will have a relationship with the Spirit and can discern what the Spirit is calling us to do.

In this awful situation of a world in confusion, where sin crashes into innocent lives in such violent ways, the parable of the wheat and weeds in the same field tell us that though evil carries on growing it will not win! We who pray, are those who can cry out for justice in the name of all those loved little ones of the Lord! We are the voice of Jesus! May all those who have died rest in God's peace. Amen.

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.

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