Be grateful!

Luke 10:13-16

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Alas for you, Chorazin! Alas for you, Bethsaida! If Tyre and Sidon had been given half the chances given you, they'd have been on their knees long ago, repenting and crying for mercy. 14 Tyre and Sidon will have it easy on Judgment Day compared to you. 15" And you, Capernaum! Do you think you're about to be promoted to heaven? Think again. You're on a mud slide to hell. 16 "The one who listens to you, listens to me. The one who rejects you, rejects me. And rejecting me is the same as rejecting God, who sent me."

Food for thought!

This gospel reminds us that to have heard God's word is both a great privilege and great responsibility. Everyone will be judged according to what he has had the chance to know; the little or the more we know is always enough to either save us or condemn us. We allow things in a child we condemn in an adult; we forgive things in a mad person we punish in a normal man. Responsibility is the other side of privilege. And privilege is the other side of responsibility. Whatever we have been given in this life, both spiritual and material, is both a gift and a task.

In other words, God has equipped each one of us for a task; we are custom-built for something. We are what we are, we are where we are for a purpose. If someone else had been given half the chances and opportunities given us, " they'd have been on their knees long ago, repenting and crying for mercy."

Let us be grateful for all life has given us, like work, family, health, etc.

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, spent the years after his time in the Nazi concentration camps trying to give back to others. He taught as a professor at Boston University. He also travelled extensively giving talks and sharing the wisdom he gained from his life experiences. One of the questions he asked young people was, “How will you cope with the privileges and obligations society will feel entitled to place on you?” As he tried to guide them, he shared his sense of responsibility to others: What I receive I must pass on to others. The knowledge that I have must not remain imprisoned in my brain. I owe it to many men and women to do something with it. I feel the need to pay back what was given to me. Call it gratitude . . . To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been there before me, and I walk in their footsteps."