Offer your powerlessness to Jesus

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time—A

Time and again, all over the United States, have I been refused food by the big house on the hill; and always have I received food from the little shack down by the creek or marsh, with its broken windows stuffed with rags and its tired-faced mother broken with labor. Oh, you charity-mongers! Go to the poor and learn, for the poor alone are the charitable. They neither give nor withhold from their excess. They have no excess. They give, and they withhold never, from what they need for themselves, and very often from what they cruelly need for themselves. (Jack London, The Road, “Confession”)

Most of us will help someone in need but not without calculating the cost to our wallet or ego. The Gospel confronts our poverty of faith. For those who have nothing left to give, whose hearts have been rent by grief, who have finally let go of the bootstraps they have pulled all their lives, now have empty hands freed to receive and to give God’s abundant blessings.

The disciples offered their powerlessness to Jesus, and amid his own grief and perhaps doubt in his mission, Jesus looked to his Father in time of need. The little we have that we hoard for ourselves is never too little if we turn to God.

This post was first published in “GIA Quarterly: A Liturgical Music Journal.”

Image credit: Photo by Sam Huijbregts on Unsplash.