4th Sunday after Pentecost 17.6.18 Co-creators
with God
Our Lord delegates authority to His apostles. He brings
forth a miracle to demonstrate His power. He does this to elicit from them a
responsiveness to Him, a pattern which continues to our own time.
Our Lord could just drop food from heaven, ready-made, to
save us the trouble of making it or gathering it. He did this for the
Israelites, dropping manna from Heaven, but that was only a temporary move, not
the norm.
Generally He gives us the way of creating or producing what
we need. He provides the motivation and the wisdom; then we do our part. The
combination of our labour with His power brings about the desired result.
Our cooperation is essential because unless we do our part,
usually the result will not come.
If there is a poor man at my gate: I could pray that God
provides the man some food, but clearly God would want me to give him the food
myself.
It would be a lot easier for us if everything could be a
miracle, but it is part of God's plan that we work with Him; to discover that
we are stewards of His creation, or even co-creators with Him.
When it comes to spiritual work, we might protest that it
will not succeed if we have to do it - for example, converting large numbers of
people to faith. God could do that better than we could.
But He wants us to do it. In doing so we learn much, as we
grow into the role.
We learn about spiritual realities which otherwise we might
simply take for granted. We gain insights into God's mind and heart; we learn
to see things as He does.
He asks us to act in His name, and to call upon His help. He
will help us, but we will have to take some share of the work, and whatever
suffering attends it.
We cannot do it on our own; we can and we must do it with His help.
Where does that leave us in the Church today? Faith is
generally low, as is morale. Prayers are not made at all; or if they are made,
it is often without much conviction.
The Church is supposed to be filled with disciples who are
bubbling over with charity, generosity, and a desire to help; to be people of
faith who expect their prayers to be heard, not in a demanding sense, but
because they trust God's providence.
We pray for everything, large and small - conversion of
sinners, forgiveness of sin, food for the hungry, peace for the war-torn.
Whatever it is we bring it in prayer. We ask for it with great fervour. And it
will come.
At the same time we never evade our responsibility to do
what falls within our power to do.
We do not rely on miracles to do everything, but on the
power of God to enable us to get things right.
We have to work, plant, build - a thousand different things,
always with a recognition of God who makes it all possible, and seeking to
please Him.
All this gets better with practice. We learn as we go.
It is part of our salvation to respond to God, and His
promptings. We do not take Him for granted, or deny His power over us. We
acknowledge totally His goodness, His generosity and our dependence on Him.
We grow in trust of Him. We welcome whatever He wants to
tell us. Speak, Lord, Your servant is
listening (I Kings (1 Samuel) 3,7-11)
In all things we obey exactly what He tells us to do. This
is the formula for how to work a miracle! And how to make ordinary things run
smoothly.
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