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Gospel Reflection for Saturday, April 5, 2025
If there’s one thing we all like, it’s living peacefully, with certain routines that make life more pleasant. It’s what psychologists today call the «comfort zone,» which is the same as saying, in a more traditional way, «there’s no place like home.» In fact, there’s nothing worse than being «taken out of our comfort zone.» It upsets us and leaves us confused. We prefer to go back home, to what we’re used to.
Well, faith is precisely something that takes us out of our comfort zone, that shakes us up, away from what we’ve usually thought was good, to take us to another dimension. It’s not just about recognizing that God exists. It’s much more. Suddenly discovering that everyone is my brother or sister because God is our Father forces us to change our relationship with them. Discovering that God is my father and creator, that he’s no longer a controlling judge and prosecutor of my every action, changes my relationship with him. All of that also changes my relationship with myself, with my life.
That’s a lot of changes. And it’s not easy to assimilate them. In fact, change, any change, is what’s hardest for us in life. Realizing that things are no longer going to be the way they were makes us very nervous. Because deep down, we love routines, doing the same things, the same way.
The Jewish people had that problem with Jesus. His presence, his way of speaking and acting, took them out of their comfort zone, forced them to rethink, redo, and rebuild their relationship with God and with others, Jewish and non-Jewish. It took them out of their comfort zone of what they had always thought, what they had been taught since childhood. And it opened them up to a new world, which, like novelty does to us, scared them. The easiest thing was to condemn Jesus, the agent provocateur of change, and thus get rid of him. To leave things as they were and for everyone to feel comfortable again.
We are also faced with that dilemma: to accept the living presence of Jesus in our lives, with all that that means, or to go back to the same old things, to our prejudices, to our rosaries and our masses…