Tuesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
(Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 14:15-24)
Many scholars are confounded by today’s first reading. They think that belief in Jesus Christ as God
did not take place until the second or third century. Before this time, they say, Jesus was considered
God’s representative, his prophet or anointed one, but not God himself. Yet the reading clearly says that Jesus existed
in the form of God before he became human.
Then he took a step downward, so to speak, to redeem humans from our
sins.
St. Paul probably wrote the Letter to the Philippians in the
mid-fifties of the first century. The
passage today may come from a Christian hymn of perhaps a decade or two before
the composition of the letter. Belief in
Christ’s eternal divinity, it can be said with confidence, goes back almost to
the days of Jesus himself.
We need not worry that Christianity has no solid basis. But the fact that it has does not result in
automatic belief. Many detractors hurl
criticism of our faith. And we might
have our own reservations about giving ourselves completely to the Lord. It is helpful to make an act of faith
everyday and to explicitly put trust in the Lord. We will find that He blesses us when we do
so.
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