Sunday, October 8, 2017

Met Georges Khodr: I Say to You, Arise

Arabic original here.

I Say to You, Arise

Today's Gospel reading is about a miracle that the Lord performed, which shows us once again that the chief reasons for Jesus' working miracles is that He loves people. He took pity on the widow of Nain and raised her son.

Miracles are not, at root, for the Lord to prove something. He did not do them to give us proof of His divinity, since He says, "Believe in Me because of the words I speak to you. Otherwise, believe because of the works." This is the weakest sort of faith, for us to follow Him on account of miracles, while the strongest faith is for us to follow Him because of His words, because of the divine gift of words that no human pronounces, and because of the life that He spent among us, loving to the point of death. Therefore, in the Gospel of John the miracles are called "signs" because He uses them to indicate teaching. He uses them to demonstrate the aims of the Gospel and not to demonstrate might.

Christ did not reveal God's might as the Jews did. He revealed God's power in His own way. God's power was the cross. That is, He revealed a weakness that was, after the resurrection, determined to be in fact a strength. God comes down to humankind and lives with them. This is His power. He can cast aside His glory in order to be hidden among people. People desire power and it is one of their three temptations. Man is confronted with three temptations: the temptation of money, the temptation of power or glory.

Christ stepped down from all this, He refrained from all of this in order to die for something weak, so that His power might shine and so He might triumph in glory.

In this context, Jesus rose the youth from the dead and sent him to his mother. Here we must notice what Jesus said to this youth: "I say to you, arise." He could have just said "arise", but He said, "I say to you, arise."

From behind the event, if each of us looks at his weakness and his spiritual death, at his fallenness, his decline and his abandonment, at the same time he looks at the splendor of Christ, because each of us is dead and Christ says to each of us by name, "I say to you, arise."

What every single one of us must believe that Christ could have come to humankind even if there were only one human. The important thing is not that we say that Christ is the Savior of the world-- and it is true that He is the Savior of all people-- rather, the important thing is that every single one of us says, "Christ is my own savior." Each one of us can say this if he wants to reveal his weakness before Christ and confess it.

People talk about others and say that they steal and kill and lie and cheat. I have never heard someone complain about himself and say publicly, "I lie. I cheat. I take illicit profit. I have murdered." True Christianity is for me to confess before all people that I am a sinner, an adulterer, a liar, a murderer. This is what the early Christians did when confession was public. They confessed their sins and not others' sins.

When someone confesses that he is a sinner, Christ says to him, "I say to you, arise." And at that moment he arises from his sin to become a new person.

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