10 minutes wih Jesus are group of Catholic priests who share friendship with Jesus, plus keenness to help young people of all ages to learn the art of loving Jesus and speaking to Him. You can find them in WhatsApp, Spotify, Ivoox, Telegram, Goggle Podcasts and Apple Podcast. Every saturday, we are going to share one meditation by 10 minutes with Jesus. Enjoy it.
My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me, I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and the grace to make this time of Prayer fruitful; my Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel intercede for me.
Capharnaum
We hear today Jesus that you went into Capharnaum, the town which so many people say became the center, the hub of your preaching life. I guess that, in the end, you must have known the people there well, even though it’s not where you grew up. If you really did spend that much time there, you must have known everyone, I suppose. But, of course, today’s gospel passage probably takes place early in your public life, so most likely the people were just meeting you, just getting to know you. And so I find it easy to contemplate you teaching in the synagogue as we find you today. It’s captivating to look at the faces of the people there, where they´re accustomed to preachers coming from other towns.
Typical people
Probably, they usually had just the local person ships, the typical people they would have seen in the marketplace and in their streets, people they knew inside out, knew who they were, knew how they were, and knew the same message, always the same, time and again. Maybe, sometimes someone would have come visiting, a new person, unknown or at least relatively unknown, but more or less with the same message. At any rate, I bet that most didn’t expect anything like what happened when you turned up in town.
Faces
So I imagine the faces of those souls in that synagogue, looking at you, wondering what to expect, or maybe merely expecting one more rabbi, one more itinerant preacher saying kind of the same things and kind the same way, just again. And then, as I look at those faces, I see them hearing, hearing you, and hearing something different. I look at those faces captivated, surprised. Perhaps even somewhat perturbed on occasions because most likely what they heard from you seemed at least a little to contradict the things they’d heard before.
New Message
It was a new message. The good news. A completely new way of looking at things. The same, but at the same time, different to everyone else. But, of course, that’s the thing it wasn’t just different. What I really love about this gospel passage is that it wasn’t just the stuff that you taught that amazes everyone, but actually, in the words of today’s gospel, they were astounded at his teaching because he spoke with authority. You spoke with authority. Now, I don’t know, Jesus, but it seems to me that there are different kinds of authority, and the one that we see most often is the authority of a leader, like a general, or your boss at work, or your headmaster, or whoever, someone who just has a position and people listen to them because they have the position and that’s it, end of story. But I don’t think that was your kind of authority. Lord, I think there are two other things which create the kind of authority that you had, the kind of authority that really convinces.
Two things
And those two things are certainty and passion. In fact, the second flows from the other, and that’s typified Christians everywhere throughout all times. The authority of one who has absolute certainty about what they say, that are convinced. The message of the convicted soul. That interests me a lot because I think it can apply to us too. It’s not that we need to have a position of authority. We don’t need a position of any particular place amongst friends, colleagues, and the people we´re beside every day. We just need to believe what we’re saying and to be passionate about it too.
Sounds
Sounds easy maybe, or perhaps it sounds hard, depends a bit on your perspective really. To be honest, Lord, I think many people make too much of it when they feel they have to stand up for their faith, when they find that they’re in a position where they have to say something that kind of comes across as a little bit uncomfortable, and we have a kind of inferiority complex about the faith thinking Well, clearly no one’s going to agree with me and it’s not the general perspective of the world these days. So if I come up with this people are just going to think I’m dumb, will disagree with me because… because why.
Many times
Maybe so many times the problem is actually that we’re not really convinced, that we know about without knowing, that we need to trust you more, and of course sometimes we don’t have to make such a big deal about it. Sometimes, if we’ve got to come up with a comment that helps people to understand what we really believe, it’s not a matter of having to think Well, I’ve got to find a way to articulate this in such a fashion that I can kind of give a Sunday sermon about the goodness of doing such a thing or the goodness of not doing such and such another thing. In reality, with our friends, with our co-workers, with our fellow students, whoever we’re with, most of the time it’s just simply a matter of saying with all simplicity Well, you know, actually I don’t reckon so I think this other thing. That’s kind of part of a truly pluralistic society and part of true friendship. We can say what we think with complete ease.
Make things
Most of the time, we make things too difficult for ourselves by actually making a song and dance about it. It’s just as simple as saying Well, I reckon this. But, of course, the more convinced we are, the more that we’re really close to you, and really know it, and believe what we say. The more convinced we are and the more passionate we are about it, the more we speak with authority. As I think of people speaking with authority, I can’t help but think of Joan of Arc. That astonishing saint. I’d recommend to everyone actually to read personal recollections of Joan of Arc, written by, of all people, Mark Twain, who was by no means a catholic, and of course, brought up with an astonishingly anti-Catholic education. So it’s really amazing to see a person like him write a story about a catholic saint.
Story
Now, of course, his story is a story. It’s a novelized history, but he has a tremendous amount of history in it, and in fact, he himself said, I quote: I like Joan of Arc best of all my books. And it is the best. I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded to me by any of the others, twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none. Now, that’s really saying something. He seriously wanted to write a good book when he wrote the story of Joan of Arc, and he does. He takes the story of this young French girl, who became effectively the commander-in-chief of the French military. Now, that is serious authority, and serious authority from just a young peasant girl.
Authority
But what gave her that authority, what gave her that audacity and daring to walk into the court of the king and demand that she, of all people, be given authority over all the French military forces. It was her character, perhaps? Possibly. She seems to have been somewhat daring – there’s a great story in that book about her rebuking the parish priest because he had banished the fairies who were in a nearby tree. But what she really had, whether it’s talking to the parish priest or talking to the king of her nation, was conviction, conviction and passion.
She knew
She knew that she had God behind her, and she spoke like that. Well, you and I, we need a little more of Joan of Arc in ourselves, that conviction and that passion, knowing that we speak with Jesus Christ behind us. When we have that authority, it creates a certain freedom of spirit, independence, individuality, something that so many people long for these days, the capacity to be happy with who we are and not to need to be who others tell us what we ought to be.
Freedom
That’s a freedom founded on God, a real foundation in independence and self-belief, even to the point of going truly counter culture. That way we can do it with joy. Lord, help us to find that conviction and that passion in you, help us to look to the saints of the past, especially those like saint Joan of Arc, and then to want to become the saints of the future. We know that you need saints, and we need help, your help to attain the conviction and the passion that they had, that they obtained from you, since it was you who had it from the beginning.
Mary
Our mother Mary show us how to get so close to your son that we can participate in his authority, so that our belief doesn’t dominate our actions but inspires them; such that we have not an authority that comes from an outside impose on us, but so that we express an authority which liberates us from so many lies, and enables us to liberate so many others at the same time.
It´s the end
I thank you my God for the good resolution, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me in this meditation. I ask your help to put them into effect; my Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel intercede for me.
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