Word of the day

A reading from the Book of Jeremiah
JER 18:1-6

This word came to Jeremiah from the LORD:
Rise up, be off to the potter’s house;
there I will give you my message.
I went down to the potter’s house and there he was,
working at the wheel.
Whenever the object of clay which he was making
turned out badly in his hand,
he tried again,
making of the clay another object of whatever sort he pleased.
Then the word of the LORD came to me:
Can I not do to you, house of Israel,
as this potter has done? says the LORD.
Indeed, like clay in the hand of the potter,
so are you in my hand, house of Israel.

From the Gospel according to Matthew
MT 13:47-53

Jesus said to the disciples:
“The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea,
which collects fish of every kind.
When it is full they haul it ashore
and sit down to put what is good into buckets.
What is bad they throw away.
Thus it will be at the end of the age.
The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous
and throw them into the fiery furnace,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”

“Do you understand all these things?”
They answered, “Yes.”
And he replied,
“Then every scribe who has been instructed in the Kingdom of heaven
is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom
both the new and the old.”
When Jesus finished these parables, he went away from there.

We all have to pass through death. Yet it is one thing to pass through this in the hands of the devil, and quite another to pass through it in the hands of God. I love to listen to these words: we are in the hands of God. And this was so from the very beginning. The Bible uses a beautiful image to explain our creation: God who with his hands forms us out of mud, out of the clay of the earth, into his image and likeness. It was God’s hands that fashioned us: God the artist. And therefore, God does not abandon us. (Santa Marta, 12 November 2013)