In the Gospel for today, we see Jesus once again casting out demons and healing people who were sick. Then he does something interesting. He rebukes the demons who are trying to tell people who He is. He silences them and refuses to let them tell people He is the Christ. Why? Why would God want to hide who He is?
I don’t think He was hiding anything. Instead, Jesus was teaching us something about Satan. The devil is a liar and the father of lies. The thing about lies is that they usually contain just enough truth to be believable, but they always twist and distort the truth. Satan works just like that. He wants to manipulate how you think about yourself as well. He wants you to see yourself as a warped version of who you God created you to be, instead of how God sees you.
Please don’t listen to him. Instead, we have to focus our attention on Jesus. God wants to heal us of those negative images of ourselves. He wants to give us spiritual eyes not just to see ourselves with dignity but others as well. As St. Paul says in the first reading, it is God who causes growth. That means we have to spend time with Him—time in prayer.
I read yesterday that Saint Padre Pio said around 30 rosaries a day. That’s about 8 hours of just praying. Most of us find it hard to find time to pray at all. We find time for work, school, kids, friends, sports, and so forth. The problem is that we too have time to pray, but we place it as last in our priority list. Instead of putting prayer in first, we put in all the other things. Then we try to find time in between those things to squeeze God in. We need to put God first then see what we have time left to squeeze in.
There is a fantastic thing about God: every time we put Him first, we find plenty of time for all the other things that we need to do.
A reflection for the readings for Wednesday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time: September 02, 2020