Interrupt me

The Roman Catholic Lectionary today offers some meditation about seeing the path we should take and the difficulty we may have with the crowd who are distracting us from fullness of life. The psalmist cries out to proclaim that he is frustrated in the zeal he has for the decrees of God because his foes despise him and ignore the message of Life from God. When Israel came under the control of the Greek Empire in the two centuries before the birth of Jesus, many of the Jewish people reacted to the destruction of Jerusalem and the imposition of pagan religious practice by adopting the customs of the conquerors. The Books of Maccabees tell of brothers who saw things differently and rebelled against this invasion. In the Gospel from Luke, Jesus is on His journey to Jerusalem and, as noted by Don Schwager, is very likely adopting a teaching style of rabbis to talk to the crowd as He walked. We are invited by Michele Bogard of Creighton University to put ourselves in this text. We might be become aware of times when our desire to hear and teacher or homilist has been interrupted by a person distracting us from the flow of the session. We recall our frustration and annoyance about this intrusion into our doing something good, worthwhile and perhaps holy. Another position in the Gospel is that of Jesus. How likely are we to have stopped telling our important story or teaching to say to the one who interrupts   (Luke 18:41) "What do you want me to do for you”?  The path of our movement to holiness is fraught with interruptions. The Spirit will become present to us as an interrupting of patterns which are moving more with the crowd perhaps away from our mission. Hear the Word!