3 June 2020 - the power of God

Today's Readings

(Audio)

Jesus said to them, “Are you not misled
because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?

We need to know the Scriptures and the power of God to avoid being led into error, and even to avoid being led into unproductive speculation. We too sometimes allow ourselves to become fixated on ideas for their own sake, just because they seem interesting or novel to us. Yet our cool ideas can serve to insulate us from the living God. They tend to perpetuate our own limited perspectives rather than opening outward to the God whom are ideas can never entirely capture.

He is not God of the dead but of the living.
You are greatly misled.

The good news for us today is that it is possible for us to know the Scriptures and the power of God. There is a sense in which the Scriptures themselves are that power (see Romans 1:16). This is because Christ himself is the power of God and the wisdom of God (see First Corinthians 1:24). He himself is present in the Scriptures. 

This calls for a subtle shift in perspective.

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life (see John 5:39-40).

We are called to engage the faith not for vain curiosity but rather for the sake of encounter with Jesus through his Spirit. This is why we must constantly remember to stir into flame the gift of the Holy Spirit we have been given. It is this Spirit that makes the power of the Gospel and the power of Christ present to us.

For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice
but rather of power and love and self-control.

When we read in the Spirit the words can't be contained by the pages on which they are written. They become living and effective, powerful even over our own lives and hearts (see Hebrews 4:12).

Through the power of God we are offered we come to live in the light of life and immortality which the Gospel reveals. We are even able to suffer. This is something that proves our own abstractions empty. They meet resistance and dissolve. But the confidence we have in Christ gives us strength.

On this account I am suffering these things;
but I am not ashamed,
for I know him in whom I have believed
and am confident that he is able to guard
what has been entrusted to me until that day.