Weekly thoughts on the Sunday Gospel, readings or a topic...

----------------------------------------------

seeing your life through the lens of the gospels – John 3:16-18
1. The reading evokes contrasting images of God, a God who judges and a God who saves. We might reflect on how our image of God has changed with the years. What has helped you to believe in a God whose will is that you should have eternal life?
2. God sent his Son into the world for this purpose, that we might have eternal life. How has the story of Jesus helped you to have that kind of faith?
3. The eternal life promised is life that survives all forms of death, failure, defeat and humiliation. What has helped you to have that sense of being alive, even in painful and disappointing circumstances?  – John Byrne, OSA

The Deep End
‘Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.’ (Henri Nouwen)
What was the Incarnation, if not God’s compassion in human form? Today, the Feast of the Trinity, we hear one of the best-loved passages from John’s Gospel: ‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son.’ In giving Jesus, God immersed himself fully in our world and in our humanity. Not only that, but he experienced humanity in its most broken form, all the way to suffering and death. And all of this, he did out of love and compassion for us.
We have only to look at how he treated those who were most marginalised in his own time. He was with people in their brokenness, in their fear and suffering. He became weakness itself. We are called to do the same. True compassion means entering into the brokenness of the world. You will have heard the expression that we can’t truly understand another person until we have walked a mile in their shoes. Before we judge others for their choices or their situation in life, we must really understand them, be with them, and share in their experiences. That is true compassion.
– Tríona Doherty

(from Intercom)