Suy Niệm bài đọc thứ Tư tuần thứ 9 Thường Niên

 Suy Niệm bài đọc thứ Tư tuần thứ 9 Thường Niên

Cuộc sống hiện tại có thể sẽ mang lại cho chúng ta những cú sốc tàn phá và những gánh nặng đau đớn. Nhiều người trong chúng ta có ít nhất một lần bị cú sốc quá đau đớn đến nổi la chỉ có muốn được chết thôi. Ngay cả cái chết nhiều khi có vẻ như là một sự lựa chọn hấp dẫn hơn là phải tiếp tục sự đau khổ. Nhưng Thiên Chúa còn vĩ đại hơn là bất cứ một sự đau khổ nào mà con người đã phải nhận. Vì Thiên Chúa rất vô cùng rộng lượng và luôn thương xót.

Như bài đọc trong sách Tôbia, ông Tobit không thể chịu đựng được cái cảnh mù loà của mình nữa và Sarah cũng đã bị áp đảo tinh thần bởi cái chết liên tiếp của bảy người chồng ngay trong đêm tân hôn. Cả hai đã cầu mong cho cái chết để cứu vãn sự đau khổ của họ, nhưng cả hai cuối cùng quay trở lại với Thiên Chúa. Ông Tobit đã được khôi phục và sáng mắt, Còn Sarah đã được cứu sống bởi Tobia và cuối cùng đã kết hôn với anh ta. Cuối cùng, họ đã ca ngợi Thiên Chúa vì lòng thương xót và lòng từ bi mà họ đã được chứng minh.

Đây là một lời nhắc nhở cho chúng ta biết là không nên dễ chán nãn bỏ cuộc hay đầu hàng bóng tối và sự tiêu cực. Sự đau khổ của con người không phải là ý muốn của Chúa, và Thiên Chúa luôn hiện diện nơi chúng ta để ban cho chúng ta lòng can đảm, niềm hy vọng, và sự chữa lành.

Chúng ta cần phải mở rộng tâm hồn và trái tim của chúng ta cho một cái gì đó to lớn hơn. Sự sống đời đời chắc chắn còn to lớn hơn những gì mà chúng ta có thể tưởng tượng và chúng ta không nên nghĩ về sự sống đời đời của chúng ta theo ý nghĩa hay điều kiện của con người trần thế. Có lẽ chúng ta có thể cho phép Thiên Chúa đến với chúng ta một cách bất ngờ và thách thức chúng ta trong việc trả lời câu hỏi về đức tin của chúng ta. Lạy Chúa, xin mở rộng long trí và trái tim của của chúng con.

Reflection SG

Life can bring us some devastating blows and painful burdens. Many people have at one time or another reached their limit and longed to have their life end. Even death sometimes seems a more attractive option than continued misery and suffering. But God is greater than any human suffering and God is infinitely merciful. Tobit could not stand his blindness any longer and Sarah was overwhelmed by the death of seven consecutive husbands on her wedding night.

Both longed for death to give them relief, but both ultimately turned to God. Tobit had his sight restored and Sarah was rescued by Tobias and finally married to him. In the end, they praised God for the mercy and compassion they had been shown.

It is a reminder to us not to give up or to surrender to darkness and negativity. Human pain and misery is not God’s will, and God is always present to grant us courage, hope, and healing. The Sadducees tried to trap Jesus with a trick question about a woman married to seven different brothers. He replied that they knew neither the Scriptures nor the power of God — their question showed ignorance and a lack of religious imagination. Life in God’s Kingdom is not just a continuation of our earthly life.

We need to open our minds and hearts to something far greater — eternal life is greater than we can ever imagine and we should not think of it in earthly terms. Perhaps we can allow God to surprise and challenge us in answering our religious questions. Lord, expand my mind and heart.

Opening Prayer:

 Dear Lord Jesus, I come before you in prayer. I am grateful for this opportunity. Thank you for your willingness to listen to me. Help me to be confident in what I ask from you and attentive to what you tell me. Increase my love for you so that my deepest desire is simply to do what you ask of me.

Encountering Christ:

1. “Whose Wife Will She Be?”: “For all seven had been married to her.” In the art of debate, one of the tools employed is the reduction to absurdity; that is, you take the other person’s argument to an extreme to show that if their argument were true, it would lead to consequences patently absurd or contradictory, and thereby false. However, this approach is often reduced to the mere mockery of someone’s argument. That is what the Sadducees attempted with Our Lord. They did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, so to disprove arguments for the afterlife, they thought of a ridiculous example. It was not enough to raise their objection with the example of two brothers having married the woman, but seven. Theirs was more of a “gotcha” question; they seemed little open to an answer.

2. “Are You Not Misled?”: Jesus’s humility and concern for souls shone forth in his encounters with his enemies. Although keenly aware of their insincerity and verbal traps, he nevertheless took their questions at face value in order to teach them and lead them to conversion. He ignored the mockery and instructed their ignorance: “When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they are like the angels in heaven” (Matthew 7:29). Jesus teaches as one with authority. He provided us with a profound pedagogical lesson. Whenever there is a question about the faith, even if couched in ridicule, we have an opportunity to give an answer. We should do so with as much clarity and charity as possible. Our confidence lies not so much in our delivery, important as that is, but in the power of truth and the subsequent work of the Holy Spirit.

3. God of the Living: Our Lord revealed a profound truth that goes to the heart of the Sadducees’ disbelief in the resurrection of the dead, starting with what they did believe. They believed in God and in his revelation to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They believed that God spoke to Moses. Therefore, if they believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they implicitly believed in man’s everlasting life. Jesus told them that God still “is” the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not “was.” Therefore, not only does God still exist, but so do Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God is God of the living. God is the very source of life. God is never “stuck” in the past. Death does not have the last word with God. Our Lord’s Resurrection will make this truth even more abundantly clear.

Conversing with Christ: Lord Jesus Christ, with the aid of your Holy Spirit and the guidance of the Magisterium, continue to lead me from my errors and confusion into all truth (John 16:13). However, I want more than simply seeing clearly; help me to grow in my personal relationship with you. Increase my faith so that I may see your hand at work in even the smallest details of my daily life: a sunset, a flower, a child’s smile. May I have the humility to realize that I still have much to learn about my faith, and the generosity to share the truth about you with others.

Resolution: Lord, today by your grace I will read from either Scripture or the Catechism and then share what I learned with someone else.

REFLECTION

There was a Jewish law, which stated that should a man die childless, the next oldest brother was to marry the widow. The first child of this union would legally be considered the child of the brother who had died. The Sadducees, the priests of Jesus’ day, use this law to build a fantastic story about a woman who married the oldest of seven brothers. The first brother died childless; the woman was taken as wife by the second brother, but he also died before she could conceive. And so with the rest of the seven, each of them died childless, after the woman had married each in turn.

Why did they construct this story? The Sadducees didn't believe in the resurrection, in life after death. Jesus did. So they figure that if they spring this story on Jesus and then ask him, "If there is a resurrection, which of the seven brothers will be the woman's husband?" Everyone, especially the people, will see how ridiculous the ideas of resurrection and immortality are.

To this, Jesus answers quite seriously, "When God spoke to Moses, he identified himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, even though the three patriarchs had long been dead," Jesus continues, "God,

however, is the God of the living, not of the dead. If God is the God of the patriarchs, though they have died, they must still be living."

Meditation:

It has been said in various ways that a fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer. Unfortunately not all questions are asked in a pure search for truth, much less for salvific truth. So the Sadducees constructed a very unlikely story to pose a question to Jesus.

`Though Mark does not say so, we see here a pattern of people asking Jesus questions, not in a search for truth and enlightenment but in order to trap him and to have something to accuse him with. Jesus does not quite call them “fools” to their face, but he does so indirectly: “you are badly misled” and “you are very much mistaken”.

`Whenever we experience the desire or the need to ask questions about our faith or about the moral teaching of the Church, for example, let us always pause for a moment and reflect on our motivation: are we just being facetious or even derogatory, or are we really searching for the salvific truth that comes through God’s revelation, that “truth which sets us free.” (John 8:32)?

Holy Spirit, when I am led to ask questions about faith or morality, grant me the grace of honesty and a genuine desire for knowledge of the truth that sets us free.

Scripture: Mark 12:13-17

Yesterday it was the Pharisees and Herodians, today it is the Sadducees trying to trap him. These Sadducees, however, are more worldly and relaxed; they only want to make fun of the idea of a next life. They were a minority group in the country, wealthy landowners and merchants, collaborators with Rome, minimalist in religion, rejecting the teaching about angels and spirits, accepting as the word of God only the first five books of the Scriptures. No rabbi had ever produced evidence of a next life from those first five books. But Jesus managed to do so! In this way: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are the most prominent figures in those first books. In the second of those books God had proclaimed himself “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6). If these men are just dead, said Jesus, then God is reigning over a kingdom of death, not a kingdom of life!

If you believe only in death you see only death everywhere. Jesus, who is “the way, the truth and the life”, calls us to believe in life. As far as I know, no Sadducee is known by name in the New Testament; and the whole group died out after 70 AD. It was consistent with their belief in death. Like diet, it is important to pay attention to your beliefs, because you are what you believe.