26th April 2021, Year B
Called to enter “the door of the sheep”
Acts 11: 1-18
Ps: 42: 2-3; 43:3-4 (R 42: 3ab)
Jn 10: 1-10
As people, we classify people according to their geographical background, social and political interests, race, gender, tribe, and many other distinctions and of which are of o essential nature to our Christian vocation. However, these unnecessary features have to a larger extent prevented many of us from reaching out to others or helping others to realize that we have a common vocation in God Our Father.
There are people we do not want to talk to, work with or sit next to simply because they are from a different county. There are instances even within our Church that parents say “you cannot get married to him or her because of his or her tribe”.
Are these accidents or features we get entangled of any necessity? If we are to look at one another as unique yet called to communion and cooperation we would rather do good to humanity and in a special way in the vocation that we are called to. We very often lose opportunities of evangelizing simply because we classify certain people as unworthy or even rigid according to our little knowledge of them or simply because of generalizing. If I happened to have had a bad experience with one person from a certain place or Small Christian Community, everyone else from that place is the same. The first reading is challenging each one of us because of the divisions that we see in our broken world, nation, society and families today.
The Spirit continues to move Jesus’ disciples to open up and without discrimination embrace Gentiles as substantial members of God’s family. In the house of Cornelius, a Gentile, God officially uses Peter, leader of the Church, to accomplish this. The Jerusalem brethren are annoyed not because Peter baptized the Gentiles, but because he ate with them. Eating with anybody indicates oneness and intimate relationship. While we all claim one Father and partake of the one body and blood of Christ, we need to watch out and not discriminate against people for diverse reasons. Such contradictory actions prevent us from entering by the door, which is Christ.
Let us pray:
Lord make me an instrument of your peace. Amen.
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