Room for the Word?

Wednesday, April 05, 2017

Jesus speaks to the unbelievers: “You are trying to kill me because my word finds no room among you.” (John 8:37)

God forbid this be true in our own lives, but yet . . .

Many people have constructed a world built around them (as center) that is highly structured and well defended even though its existence is nothing more than an illusion. In fact it is so well defended that no word other than what already exists can manage to get in, to find room, to take its place. Until we do the difficult and sometimes painful work of spiritual growth that bit by bit shatters the illusions that we have built around us, we are no better off than those Pharisees who were plotting to death of Jesus even while He was speaking to them.

You’ve had these experiences with others, perhaps, especially with recalcitrant children or with people from “the other” political party or with estranged spouses or other relatives, and it is a tiresome, exhausting and thankless and often fruitless struggle to “get a word in edgewise.”

Imagine then, based on your own experience, the agonized frustration that Jesus was suffering as he tried to address the religious leaders of His day. Imagine, if you dare, that God may experience the same frustration with you or with me at times, despite the fact that His love is not based on our merits and will, eventually overcome the barriers we erect to “protect” ourselves from it.

It is up to each of us to take a painfully honest look at the barriers we have constructed and to ask, in prayer, for the Lord to help us dissolve them with a good dose of reality. Only then can grace get to us. The Scholastic philosophers taught that the power of grace is dependent on an individual’s capacity to receive it. This is why, by the way, that we can suddenly discover in a passage of Scripture meanings and applications to our own lives that we had never noticed before. When we read those lines at other times, we weren’t ready to hear them the way we can hear them now. We had to get to this point until the Word could indeed “find room among us.”

What are you ready for now?

God bless you!