Saturday, July 6, 2019

6 July 2019 - blessings in disguise




Please sit up and eat some of my game,
so that you may give me your special blessing.

How much do we desire the LORD's blessing? Do we desire it enough to seek it? Or do we rather miss it due to passivity? We are not called to lies or deception to gain our blessing. But we are called to bring our Father the sustenance he desires from the field of the world. We offer him the fruit the Spirit produces in our souls and the fruit of the harvest of evangelization.

Jacob served it to him, and Isaac ate;
he brought him wine, and he drank.

This service to which we are called seems to include so much activity on our part as to exclude the free gift of grace. But in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus does tell us that those who habitually act in a certain way experience blessedness. Yet we cannot do these things and bear fruit without grace. Fortunately, like Jacob, we have a mother to help us.

Rebekah had been listening
while Isaac was speaking to his son Esau.

We ourselves may have nothing in us to make us deserve the blessings promised. But our mother Mary can help us to look more and more like Jesus, to prepare the Father a meal more and more like the lamb, and so receive the very blessings that the Father gives to Jesus himself.

"Let peoples serve you,
and nations pay you homage;
Be master of your brothers,
and may your mother's sons bow down to you.
Cursed be those who curse you,
and blessed be those who bless you."

We can't just put these new ideas in the old wine skins of our lives. We can't waste new cloth on patching old clothes. We need attentiveness to Jesus if we truly want to participate in the promised feast.

Jesus answered them, "Can the wedding guests mourn
as long as the bridegroom is with them?

We celebrate in the presence of Jesus. When he seems distant we bear fruit and are pruned so that we are ready to celebrate again as soon as he returns.

For the LORD has chosen Jacob for himself,
Israel for his own possession.


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