To God Give the Glory!

In today’s first reading we learn of Paul and Barnabas’ encounter with both persons who wanted to stone them to death and those, in another city, who were preparing to worship them as gods, following their intercession for a man crippled from birth. Because the cripple had “the faith to be healed,” Paul and Barnabas called upon the Lord Jesus to heal him. He was healed.  When Paul and Barnabas realized that the people were about to slaughter animals to offer sacrifice to Paul and Barnabas, they stopped them from such idolatry.  How easy for us to allow people to idolize us and for us to allow ourselves to be idolized or for us to divinize others.  It is the nature of the ego to want to be like God (compare Gen.32-4) when Satan said to Eve: Oh, come on!  God knows that you will be like Him if you eat of the fruit of that tree. You won’t die.).  On the other hand, it is also easy for us to demonize others and, unconsciously, use that to make ourselves look like a god, better than others and certainly holier than the person/s we are demonizing.

In the responsorial psalm of today’s liturgy, Ps. 115, we pray: “Not to us, O Lord, not to us but to your name give glory because of your mercy, because of your truth.”  Do I really mean that? Do I realize that whatever good another or that I do, is done because of God working through us?  Do I realize that when I am demonizing another, what I despise in that other person exists within me, that I am capable, in my worse moments, when I depart from God’s ways, of doing the very same thing I am upset about in the other person/s?

Before God, we are who we are!  In God, we all are redeemed, washed clean of our sins, in need of God’s mercy and made whole by God alone, as was the man crippled from birth!