Neville Kyrke-Smith writes a Reflection for the Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)
An old priest friend of mine once survived a terrible car accident. He told me that the last word he said before the impact was “Jesus”. He was convinced Our Lord saved him.
Yet so often today we hear the name of God taken in vain. “Oh God” or ‘”Jesus” people cry out when there is something ridiculous or profane. Surely it is time for us to reclaim the name of Jesus!
In today’s Collect we pray: “Grant. O Lord, that we may always revere and love your holy name” for in His name we are “set firm on the foundation of (His) love”. In the reading from Jeremiah chapter 20 today we hear echoes of the conflicts, violence and persecutions of our age too: “Terror is on every side”. Yet we are exhorted to “Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord!”
In today’s Gospel, Matthew 10:26-33, Christ tells his Apostles to have no fear of those who destroy the body but not the soul. Perhaps like the sparrows he refers to we can sing and pray in joy and hope, with His Holy Name, whatever we face in daily life.
Maybe we can use the Jesus prayer, from an Eastern tradition but one many Catholics use, in meditation or as an act of contrition:
‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy upon me a sinner’.
For we must let Jesus shine through us, as St John Henry Newman wrote:
“Stay with me, and then I shall begin to shine as Thou shinest: so to shine as to be a light to others. The light, O Jesus, will be all from Thee. None of it will be mine. No merit to me. It will be Thou who shinest through me upon others.”
Amen.