This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.
If we strive to live the Christian life sincerely, with all our hearts, without compromises, we align our lives to the teachings of the first reading. It tells us to give freely to God, without holding back; to make sacrifices to Him out of the full generosity of our hearts. This can mean restraining the impulses within us that could lead us to sin, or fasting at appropriate times, or striving to give cheerfully to our neighbor when we least feel like it.
It is a good way to live, but it can be exhausting. Sometimes, in the midst of the beatings this world deals out to us, it can seem that we just don’t have anything left to give.
It is thus well to remember that this isn’t the whole story: Giving to God freely, out of gratitude for all we have been given. The other part of the story comes to us in today’s gospel, which offers us a great promise: That those of us who give everything for the Gospel will receive back thirty, fifty, a hundredfold in this life, and eternal life as well.
We don’t yet understand what the eternal portion of this promise will be like, for, as St. Paul tells us, “What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him.” (cf. 1 Cor. 2:9)
But the hundredfold on earth: This comes from God’s providential curation of every moment of our lives. God would love to curate everyone’s life this way, but when people recede from Him, He respects their freedom. He still gives them good things, “for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” But He does not take up the management of their path in the same way that He does for those that fully, freely, and completely give their paths to Him. And His management of one’s path, and all that befalls one, brings the utmost of fulfillment and joy.
While He allows suffering to impact these beloved disciples of His, He uses that suffering, along with countless tender acts of the most personal and attentive love, to build their overall peace and happiness. Indeed, a hundredfold in a sense is an understatement, for no fraction of the interior happiness that God concedes to the heart given over to Him is attainable to those who withhold from Him.
Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Tell Jesus that your whole heart is His, and that you want with all your heart only the happiness that He can give. Tell Him that you trust Him, that if He leads you through the dark valley, He does so to bring that much more happiness, to you yourself as well as those you love.
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