Keep going…

Matthew (Mt. 14:15) begins this Gospel reading with “After the death of John the Baptizer…” This portrays to us the grief of our Lord over the death of His cousin. The Lord was mourning the death of a beloved friend. He was extremely saddened because He knew that John the Baptizer was killed because of Him.

Most of us, at least once in our life, have felt grief. It could be that moment in our life when we become vulnerable, so hurt that we become inconsolable. And for some time we refuse the comforting touch of others, whether sincere or with element of sarcasm and hypocrisy. We refuse even to think and look back at people who have hurt us, whether living or dead, because this will bring on so much pain in our hearts.
The Lord experienced that Himself. He grieved over the death of a beloved-- a cousin and a friend. At that moment of sadness, all He wanted was to be by Himself. He went up to the other side of town, to a mountain where He could be alone. He longed to nurse His heart and sorrow in solitude.

But after He had crossed to the side where the mountain lay, He was again confronted by a multitude who presented their need to be cured and attended to. If the Lord were only human like us, He would have barked at these people: “Can’t you understand? Can’t you see? I just want to be left alone, by myself with my grief.” But no such words ensued from our Lord’s lips, instead, He performed one of the greatest miracles in the New Testament: the multiplication of loaves of bread.

This points to all of us the fact and the reality that our grief and our hurts are not enough reasons to excuse us from living a normal life, doing a normal routine in everyday of our life, associating ourselves and serving our community and people in God’s name. I don’t mean that we steel ourselves from grief or deprive ourselves of a period of mourning by non-stop service to our community or to others. There is a time for grieving and mourning and the Lord understands we need this time. The Lord makes us see, through His actions in the Gospel, that our grief should not make us so self-absorbed that we fail to see the grief and needs of our community and others.

We will continue to encounter this situation in our lives and when we do, we must remember how the Lord grappled with His own grief and sense of loss over the death of John the Baptizer. Let us remember, how, despite His grief, the Lord continued to love and serve others.

We will ask the Lord to fill us with greater generosity so we can continue to serve even if we are hurting and overcome with heartache.

Let us ask Him to enable us to look beyond ourselves, beyond our personal sorrows and aches and allow us to once again, in the midst of our loss, be able to find ourselves and be back with our usual and daily routines, (without minding the sarcasms and insults of those people around us who have no other purpose in life but an evil intention to aggravate and worsen the situation of our grief and hurts), integrate ourselves with our community, associate with our loved ones and reach out to our family and the larger community. Come out from our nutshell and keep going despite of everything; just remember what Jesus did despite His grief and loss.

Bless us all…