As the 2019 Christmas Season Closes
Fred Gansell • January 11, 2020
“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; he has come to his people and set them free.”
Who are ‘His people’? Who has been set free but those who realized that they were in prison, those who understood that they were in captivity, those who knew that they were incapable of the love that they so desired? The poor! But, who are the poor?
We are so rich that we imagine the poor to be people that don’t have what we have. What do we have? Stuff, lots of stuff.
Stuff is only a distraction from what we need.
And it isn’t what
we need that is the subject, but who
we need!
We need God desperately so that we can both give and receive the love that we know that we are capable of. But we are in prison, incapable of giving that love. And others are in prison too, for they cannot receive the love that we know that we can give.
Romans 7: 24, I think, is a prayer of Paul’s frustration with this fact, because he says, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Then he says in verse 25, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Chapter 8 is a summary of what Luke described in the first sentence of this reflection – Paul’s experience of the God of Israel coming to His People and setting them free.
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