It is they who will turn to you

Marcus Grodi, host of The Journey Home on EWTN, also does a podcast called Deep in Scripture.  The format varies, but  Marcus will sometimes comment on 'the verse I never saw.' By this he means a verse or passage of scripture that he has read countless times, but which he never really noticed. All of us who regularly read the Bible have had that experience. It happened to me as I was reading a familiar passage from the prophet Jeremiah. The Lord is speaking to Jeremiah, who is feeling dejected because the people are refusing to listen to him. The Lord says to Jeremiah: "It is they who will turn to you; not you who will turn to them."

In my last post I quoted Etienne Gilson: "We are continually tempted to diminish or adapt our truth, in order to lessen the distance which separates our ways of thinking from those of the world." This temptation is real. In fact we see it every day when people of faith, sometimes even Priests and Bishops, bend the knee to the latest fashionable ideology. How lightly they take the words of Christ: "Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of man be ashamed."

These are troubled times. Like Jeremiah we need to stand firm in the faith, even if we must stand alone. "It is they who will turn to you; not you who will turn to them."