Daily Gospel Reflection

A Call to Kindness

Welcome back to Radical and Relevant. Today's reading is from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 16 through 21. "And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger. And when they saw it, they made known the saying which had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen as it had been told to them. And at the end of eight days, when he had been circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb."

What is it that jumps out at you today? What jumps out at me is that very often these readings, we start in a place, and you can be like, "Okay, well, where are we and who are we talking about and what's going on here?" And that's one of the reasons it helps to read the readings, especially before we go to church on Sunday. But this reading starts out and they went with all haste and found Mary and Joseph. And so, if you're just hearing this, you're like, "Okay, who went with all haste to find Mary and Joseph?" And of course, it's the shepherds. But the next sentence is, "And when they saw it, they made known the saying which had been told them concerning this child." And it really goes on and we don't know the saying. And of course, the saying, which came from the angels to the shepherds, was, "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men with whom God is pleased." And so, this is the saying. And the angels had revealed to the shepherd that this is the Christ child and follow the star and the babe beneath the star is the Christ child. And so sometimes we can be reading these readings or we can hear these readings in mass and we're not quite sure, okay, where are we? What's going on? Who's involved? Until we get deep into the reading, well, sometimes until the reading is finished. And that's why we tell you where it's from, Luke chapter 2, verses 16 through 21. Sometimes it can be helpful to read the whole chapter and get a sense of, "Okay, where is this in the whole story? What is going on?" And so that's the idea that jumped out at me today. And what does that mean for me? Well, it means that my day, today, it's just part of my big life, right? And not everyone who encounters me today knows what happened to me yesterday or what's going to happen to me tomorrow. And they don't know all the characters in my life. They don't know all the things that God has said to me and all the ways God has touched my life. They're just experiencing me just sort of out of the blue, some of them, for the first time. And they don't understand the context of my life.

The same is true for you. You've got to meet people today and they don't know what's going on in your life. They might be having a bad day. You might be having a bad day. But they're just experiencing you maybe just out of the blue for the first time. And so, we have to be mindful of that, that people don't know everything that's going on in our lives. And we need to be mindful when we encounter people. We don't know what's going on in their life. They might have just found out that their spouse died, their child died. They might have just been told yesterday they got cancer. We don't know what's going on in their lives. And so, it really is a call to gentleness. It's a call to kindness. Because the reality is everyone we ever meet is carrying a heavy burden. I talk about it in-- where did I talk about it? In life is messy. Talk about the idea that everyone we ever meet, they're carrying some burden of some type. And when we're mindful of that, we're kinder to each other. We're gentle with each other. And that is the gospel. Have a great day and remember, be bold, be Catholic.