Fr. Michael Williams

In today’s gospel Jesus tries to re-assure His troubled followers. Jesus seems to sense that His disciples are troubled about things, so He tells them, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled’. Sometimes our hearts can be troubled and Our Lord also says to us, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled’. Thomas and Philip express their troubled minds by asking Jesus questions: ‘How can we know the way?’ and ‘Let us see the Father?’ They want some answers. Sometimes we express our troubled minds by asking God questions. We would like some answers. Yet Jesus told His first disciples, and He tells us today, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled…Trust in God still, and trust in me’. He told them this because He knew that the troubles of life may tempt them not to trust God. But despite the trouble and strife of life, Jesus is calling us to trust Him.

Our Lord knows some people don’t trust God when they have troubles, but Jesus is saying that during troubling times, we need to draw closer to Him so that He can strengthen us. We need to unite ourselves to Him; we need to be like the stones or bricks in a building, tightly built around Him who is the foundation stone, Jesus.

We need to reject the voice of the Tempter who tells us not to trust God. We can be tempted not trust God and ignore Him, but that will never lead to happiness. Listening to the voice of Jesus, and acting upon it, is the way to happiness in the ‘Father’s House’, which is Heaven.

Nevertheless, even if we are close to the Lord, we will still have trials and troubles to undergo in this life. So how do we cope with troubles of life? And what do we do with the troubles and temptations of life? St Peter tells us to imitate Jesus and offer these difficulties to God the Father. The troubles and temptations of life can be offered to God as ‘the spiritual sacrifices which Jesus Christ has made acceptable to God’. Pope Benedict, gives similar advice in a letter which he wrote when he said, ‘There used to be a form of devotion…that included the idea of “offering up” the minor daily hardships that continually strike at us like irritating “jabs”, thereby giving them a meaning… [We] could insert these little annoyances into Christ\’s great “com-passion”. In this way, even the small inconveniences of daily life could acquire meaning and contribute to the economy of good and of human love’ (Spe Salvi 40). So we can offer up all the trials and tribulations of life to God.

Despite the trials and troubles of this life, if we are united to Jesus ‘the keystone’ of the building, we can become immoveable and unshakeable in Him. If we keep close to Him no trouble or temptation will overcome us, because we are built on a solid foundation stone. In another gospel Jesus says, ‘Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock’ (Matthew 7).

Let us build our lives on the Lord, uniting our sufferings to His, and allowing Him to lead us into the Father’s House at the end of our earthly lives.