The Holy Venerable-Martyr Febronia.
Apostle’s Fast.
Romans 15:17-29; Matthew 12:46-13:3.
Read Romans 15:17-29
A few verses just before today’s reading, St Paul writes, “…I have written more boldly to you on some points, as reminding you, because of the grace given to me by God, that I might be a minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that offering of the Gentiles might be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15:15,16) Recall people in your life who get very good at what they do and when they do those things, they make it look so easy. This is St. Paul in the context of his missionary work among the Gentiles. Also remind yourself that it is St. Paul’s labour among the Gentiles that became the greatest stumbling block for his fellow Jews to accept, in which in the end brings about his own martyrdom. That is how profound and significant his work was and how hugely important this was in the ultimate growth and transformation of the early Church’s identity.
Fast forward that to what that might look like in our age. Look at the example that Catherine Doherty gives us. Within her book “Urodivoi” she writes:
We are the Dispossessed. I am, as most of my friends know, a fool, for Christ’s sake, and also one of the humiliati which means the dispossessed, the forgotten, the unrecognized, the rejected.
Would you like to meet the humiliate? Go to an old peoples home, where thousands of mothers and fathers are forgotten, unvisited, uncared for. It is not difficult to do that. It is not difficult to be a fool for Christ sake and to try to penetrate the seemingly impenetrable, greed and selfishness of such places.
Do you have the courage to go into racially mixed neighbourhoods or the neighbourhoods of the poor? Yes, it takes courage to go there. Not because you are going to see the poverty that perhaps you have read about in the papers or in a book. It takes courage to enter. It takes courage to knock at the door. Who am I, who are you, that we dare to enter the “Holy of Holies” that Christ love so much? He was always with the poor.
Yes, it takes courage to go there. But a fool, for Christ’s sake can go anywhere, because people will laugh at him, and will let him in. That is the joy of being a fool, for Christ sake, one of the humiliati, one of the despised, forgotten, neglected. (page 171. “Grace in Every Season”)
We really do not need to stretch our imagination too much to identify those many places that are right out of our “front door” so to speak. One of the sentences out of Catherine’s “Little Mandate” is preach the Gospel “without compromise.”
As was mentioned in one of the reflections last week, “The lives of the saints are not necessarily that they achieved such a high degree of sanctity, but that they had the vision of the direction to go… and spent their lives in that labour.” Amen and Amen.