Wednesday of the Twenty-Second Week in Ordinary Time
In today’s gospel passage, Jesus enters the house of Simon Peter, heals his mother in law, and then she gets up and waits on them. Later the townspeople bring others who are sick to Jesus and he heals them also. This, of course, gets everyone excited and happy. The next morning, however, Jesus get up early and leaves. When the people come after him and try to persuade him to stay, and of course, keep healing, Jesus instead points to the reason that he came. He says he must move on to other places and preach the gospel there also because that is why he has come.
Here we see a subtle difference between our human priorities and Jesus’ divine priorities. We look to him for healing, and later on for feeding, after he feeds the 5,000. He is looking beyond this for us, he is working in us to prepare us for eternal life. We should try to match him with our own priorities. It sometimes happens that Jesus does not intervene in our lives the way we would like him to. When he does this, it is not because he doesn’t care, but that he is seeing the big picture, and is preparing us for eternity.
Reflection by Fr. Aquinas Keusenkothen, OSB
Posted in Articles for Ordinary Time, Daily Reflections