To What Do Our Works Give Testimony?

Jesus says to us in today’s Gospel, John 5: 31-47, “…the Father who sent me has testified on my behalf.” Jesus also says to us:  “The works that the Father gave me to accomplish…testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.”

You and I have been sent into the world by the Father as well. At our baptism, through the faith of our parents and godparents, the Father proclaimed, as at the baptism of Jesus, “This is my beloved son/daughter in whom I am well pleased.”  Do the works that you and I now do confirm that statement, namely, that you and I are truly a beloved son/daughter of God?  Do we realize that whatever good we do that such has been given to us to accomplish by God?  And that if we are doing the work that God gave us to do and are doing it in God’s name and to glorify God that such are testimony that “the Father has sent” us?

The flip side of that belief is that if we are merely doing our own will, totally disregarding God’s will for us, as was done by the Israelites in erecting a golden calf and proclaiming such as their god, that those works do not give testimony that we have been sent by God! They become god substitutes and point to an idolatry within ourselves!

The Writing on the Wall

 In today’s first reading, Daniel 5: 1-6, 13-14, 16-17, 23-28, we read about King  Belchazzar, Nebuchadnezzar’s son who, like his father, worshipped gold ,silver, bronze, iron, wood and stone as gods.  In a drunken state, he ordered that the sacred vessels of silver and gold  from the house of God in Jerusalem be brought to him so that his lords, his wives, his entertainers and he himself could drink wine from them. As they were marrying and worshipping their gods, a hand began to write on the wall. The King was terrified and called for Daniel to interpret the writing. He did so. Mene meant that God had numbered the king’s kingdom and would bring it to an end. Tekel meant that the king was found wanting in God’s eyes. He was worshipping pagan gods but not glorifying “the God in whose hand is your life breath and the whole course of your life.”  Perez meant that Belshazzar’s kingdom would be divided and given to other nations.

Do you and I read the writing on the walls of our lives when we, too, are worshipping false gods, when we have violated the sacred vessels from the Temple?  We are that temple of God.  In 1 Cor 6: 19-20 St. Paul asked “Do you know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? “  Do we glorify the God in whom we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) or are we engaging in idolatrous worship of material things?

Just as God alerted King Belshazzar, son of Nebuchadnezzar, of his waywardness and the consequences of violating the vessels of the Temple, so, too, does God alert us when we stray from the right path. Am I listening? Am I paying attention?

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!