Emmaus Walk with Bishop Jos!

Jos Tharakan
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Spirituality
  • Updated Weekly

Invitation to a Loving, Living & Life-Giving Walk with Christ! bishopjos.substack.com

  1. Apr 19

    Be the Reminder!

    My father suffered from dementia toward the end of his life. I watched it happen — slowly, tenderly, and painfully. He would forget what happened yesterday, but could tell you, in vivid detail, a story from forty years ago. Short-term memory goes first. The present slips away. And I remember sitting beside him, thinking: this is one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever witnessed. I tell you that story today because I want to talk about forgetting. And not just the kind that comes with age or illness — but the kind that seems to be a fundamental condition of the human soul. When we hear the story of two disciples walking the road to Emmaus, I need you to notice something remarkable: these are not strangers to Jesus. These are followers. And yet they walk away from Jerusalem in grief and confusion, unable to recognize the Risen Lord walking right beside them. Why? Because they forgot. Earlier in Luke chapter 24, the women at the tomb — Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James — had to be reminded by two blazing angels: “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.” Remember. It keeps coming up. And Jesus, walking to Emmaus, says it with a kind of holy exasperation: “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” He is not being cruel. He is being pastoral. He is doing what he always does: walking with the forgetful, the confused, the brokenhearted and helping them remember. But I want to suggest to you that we are not just dealing with two forgetful disciples in this story on a dusty road. We are dealing with a collective dementia, a cultural, civilizational forgetting of who we are and what we are called to become. Rumi, a great mystic poet, wrote of this ache with devastating beauty. He described the human soul as a reed cut from its reed bed, crying out for what it has lost, not because it is broken, but because it remembers, somewhere deep, where it came from. He wrote of love’s longing as a fire that burns away everything that is not essential, until what remains is the truth of who you are. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.” — Rumi That field Rumi speaks of — that is where we began. Children of one God, brothers and sisters under one sky. And we have forgotten it. We have forgotten the Holocaust. We have forgotten the millions who died because we forgot the commandment to love our neighbor. We have forgotten what is written on the very doorstep of this nation: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Emma Lazarus, a jewish woman, wrote those words as an echo of Matthew 25 — “when I was thirsty, when I was hungry, when I was a stranger.” If we claim to be a Christian nation and behave as we do now, we are not just forgetting a poem. We are forgetting the Lord himself. We are forgetting our identity. Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that every human being carries within them a natural orientation toward the good, toward truth, toward God — what he called the natural law written on the heart. Aquinas believed that we do not reason our way into knowing that we should love our neighbor. We remember it. Yes, We remember it! It is already there, inscribed in the very nature of what it means to be human. Sin, for Aquinas, is not so much rebellion as it is a kind of forgetting. Sin is a turning away from what we already, at the deepest level, know. Father Richard Rohr puts it this way: that the spiritual life is not about climbing to some new height, but about returning to the ground of who we already are: “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” That is what Jesus does on the road to Emmaus. He does not hand those two disciples a theological argument. He walks with them. He listens. He breaks bread. He lets the truth catch up with them from the inside, not the outside. And their hearts burn within them not because they learned something new, but because they finally remembered what they already knew. So what does this mean for us? It means we are called to two things simultaneously, and both matter. First, we are called to speak. When leaders or anyone deliberately deny the truth — when the poem on the Statue of Liberty is treated as an inconvenience rather than a calling — we must name it. We must call out the intentional forgetting with the same clarity that Jesus called his disciples foolish. Not from anger. From love. From the grief of someone who remembers what was forgotten. But second — and this is the harder thing — we are called to walk with. Because there are many people, like my father, who genuinely do not remember. Who have been so formed by fear, by noise, by the relentless pace of the world, that they have lost the thread back to their own humanity. These people do not need our condemnation. They need someone to walk beside them, to break bread with them, to stay patient and present until something in them begins to stir. That is ministry. That is what the angels did at the tomb. That is what Jesus did on the road. That is what the angels did again at the Ascension, when they looked at the disciples staring into the clouds and essentially said: “Stop gazing upward. Get on with your lives. Walk with each other.” Be the Reminder The world around us is suffering from a kind of spiritual amnesia. It has forgotten that we are all children of one God, made for love, made for each other. Our calling is not to have all the answers. Our calling is to be the reminder. When you sit with someone in grief, you are reminding them they are not alone. When you welcome the stranger, you are reminding the world of what it forgot. When you break bread with someone whose politics infuriate you and find the image of God still there — you are doing exactly what Jesus did on that dusty road to Emmaus. You are not just helping them remember. You are helping yourself remember too. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road, while he opened the Scriptures to us?” Luke 24:32. May your heart burn again this week. Thanks for reading Emmaus Walk with Bishop Jos!! This post is public, so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com

    13 min

  2. Apr 14

    When Profit Wears a Crown of Thorns.

    Shirley Chisholm’s observation cuts with surgical precision across decades: “When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.” She said this in the 1970s, but it reads like a dispatch from this morning’s news cycle. Some truths are stubborn that way. There is a useful distinction worth making at the outset. Animals operate by instinct — they react, they survive, they pursue. No one blames a wolf for what it does. But human beings are different. We possess rationality, and from that rationality flows something instinct can never produce: character. Character is not what we feel. It is what we choose — especially under pressure, especially when no one is watching, especially when we have every reason to do otherwise. The oldest literature in the world understood this. Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers, falsely accused, imprisoned and forgotten, eventually rose to power in Egypt. When famine brought those same brothers to his feet — desperate, unrecognizing, utterly vulnerable — he had every reason to be vindictive. The instinct would have been revenge. Instead, he wept. He fed them. He said, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” That is not instinct. That is character — rationality shaped by something larger than the self, expressed through conduct when conduct was costly. This is precisely why the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s warning carries such weight today. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she observed that the most dangerous leaders are not openly monstrous, but those who have convinced themselves — and their followers — of their own righteousness. Let us take a pause to see if we know someone like that today. When a leader borrows the imagery of Christ’s self-sacrifice to decorate a project built on self-interest, we are not witnessing faith. We are witnessing the absence of character — instinct dressed in borrowed robes. Pure absense of Character! Cornel West puts it plainly: “You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people.” Love, in any serious moral tradition, reveals itself in conduct. It shows up in policy, in sacrifice, in the willingness to bear cost for others. It does not announce itself with a golden Bible or a messianic pose. When actions consistently contradict the image being projected, we are not dealing with a failure of messaging. We are dealing with a failure of character — which is simply to say, a failure of the rational, moral self to govern. James Baldwin saw this self-deception with devastating clarity when he says, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” A nation that cannot name what it is witnessing — the weaponization of the sacred, by those who govern against the poor, the immigrant, the vulnerable — cannot begin to correct it. Let us not condone the failure of nerve among the leaders and pastors, rather let us remember this as character shown plainly and openly for us to be the judges of it. I will put it in the words of philosopher Simone that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Pay attention now, because there will be a day when this attention we pay, will pay off the attention we give to it now. Truly seeing another person — their dignity, their suffering, their humanity — is itself a moral act. I want to say that again. Seeing another person — their dignity, their suffering, their humanity — is itself a moral act. Its opposite, the studied indifference of the powerful, is a form of violence dressed in fine clothing. Joseph paid attention to his brothers’ hunger even when their cruelty was fresh. That attention was the proof of his character, not his words about himself. What does it mean when the symbols of self-giving love are borrowed to dress up self-interest? It means we have arrived at a moment that demands not outrage alone, but clarity. Chisholm was right about profit. Baldwin was right about facing things. And Joseph — three thousand years removed — remains an example precisely because character, unlike instinct, does not expire. Character does not expire! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com

    8 min

  3. Apr 5

    The Wrong People Saw It First!

    One of the most remarkable testimonies of our time is the witness of Mother Teresa of Calcutta — a woman who spent her life finding the face of Jesus not in cathedrals, not in the comfortable pews of the powerful, but in the gutters of Kolkata, in the hollow eyes of the abandoned, and in the trembling hands of the forgotten. She knelt beside Hindu men ravaged by leprosy and saw the crucified Christ. She cradled children discarded by the side of the road and held the very body of God. She looked upon women cast away by their families and recognized, somehow, the divine image they still carried. What was she doing, really? She was restoring the love of God to those from whom it had been stolen — stripped away by poverty, by caste, by cruelty, by neglect. She was not simply performing charity. She was performing resurrection. The True Meaning of Resurrection This Easter, I want us to wrestle with what resurrection actually means . Because if we reduce it only to the miraculous resuscitation of a single body — Jesus walking out of a tomb two thousand years ago — we may be missing the far greater and more urgent miracle it announces to us today. The resurrection is not merely about restoring life to one dead man. It is about restoring life — hope, dignity, belonging — to every human being who has been made to feel that their life does not matter. It is God’s declaration that hope cannot be buried. That love cannot be entombed. That no human being, however abandoned or despised, is beyond the reach of the divine. The recipients of resurrection hope are not the triumphant. They are the ones who have run out of hope entirely. The feast of Easter is the feast of those who had nothing left to believe — and then found that God had not finished with them yet. God Shows No Partiality In our reading from Acts, the early church was forced to confront one of its deepest assumptions. Peter — a devout Jew, a follower of Jesus — stood in the home of Cornelius, a Roman Gentile, and announced words that must have startled even him: “God shows no partiality.” Not to the Jew over the Gentile. Not to the Roman over the Samaritan. Not to the powerful over the poor. Not to the citizen over the stranger. The reason God shows no partiality is not a matter of policy — it is a matter of identity. We are all children of God. Every last one of us. The architecture of divine love has no walls, no gates, no checkpoints. There was not a person on earth who did not have room to dine with Jesus — not even Judas, who still found his place at the table on the night of the Last Supper. Resurrection Is Universalism, Not Exclusivity The resurrection proclaims a radically inclusive God. And this brings us to a profound irony at the heart of our national conversation. There are those who insist this is a Christian nation — and in one sense, they are more right than they know. Because the founding vision of this nation, whatever its many failures in practice, was stamped with the very logic of resurrection. Emma Lazarus gave it voice in the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” This is resurrection language. The tired. The poor. The wretched. The homeless. These are precisely the people Easter is for. Emma Lazarus, herself Jewish, envisioned America as a place of refuge for all people, regardless of origin, religion, or status — a nation built not on dominance but on the dignity of the displaced. The Dangerous Heresy of Christian Nationalism Here is where we must speak plainly. Christian nationalism — the ideology that fuses the Christian faith with ethnic, cultural, or political dominance — does not merely misunderstand American history. It misunderstands the very Christ it claims to follow. “Christian nationalism confuses the flag with the cross, the nation with the Kingdom of God, and the powerful with the blessed. But Jesus did not rise from the dead to crown an empire. He rose to call a marginalized woman by name and send her — above all the men — to announce the news of new life to the world.” Consider who witnessed the resurrection first. Not the high priest. Not the Roman governor. Not the powerful disciples who had access and influence. The first witness to the resurrection was a woman — Mary Magdalene — someone the world had cast aside. Jesus called her by name. He did not call Peter first. He did not appear first to those in power. He appeared to the marginalized, and he commissioned her as the first evangelist in history. The poor, the fisherman, the tax collector, the farmer, the prostitute — those who knew they needed God — were the ones who could see the risen Christ. Those who clung to power and status fell over at the sight of truth, dignity, and divinity. Our Easter Calling So this Easter, let us be clear about what we celebrate. We celebrate a God who shows no partiality. A love that cannot be entombed. A hope that belongs to those who have none. A resurrection that is not the property of any nation, race, or political movement — but belongs to the whole of humanity. Like Mother Teresa, may we find the crucified Christ in the faces of those the world has thrown away. And like Mary Magdalene, may we be the first to run and announce: Hope is not dead. It never was. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com

    11 min

  4. Apr 5

    It began in a garden. Not a Temple!

    Did you know that God Has Always Met Us in Gardens? God did not place humanity in a temple. He placed us in a garden. From the very beginning, the sacred has been woven into the sensory — into soil and seed, into morning light through leaves, into what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things.” The divine has always smelled like earth after rain. And here is what I want you to hold today: the first time God called someone by name — the very first time — was in a garden. Not from a throne. Not through a prophet at a distance. God walked in the cool of the evening and called: “Where are you?” That question was not about geography. God knew exactly where Adam was. It was an invitation. A reaching out. The theologian Walter Brueggemann reminds us that this God is not “a static, settled deity,” but one who moves toward us, who enters our hiding places and calls us out of them. The Bible opens in a garden and the resurrection happens in one. That is not coincidence. That is architecture. In the first garden, God found a person in hiding — ashamed, afraid, covered in fig leaves and excuses. Adam had broken trust. He flinched at the sight of the One who loved him most. And yet — God came looking. God always comes looking. In the Easter garden, Mary Magdalene stood weeping among the flowers, so consumed by grief she could not recognize the Lord standing before her. She took him for the gardener. Maybe, she was not entirely wrong. He is, after all, the one who tends us. Who kneels in the soil of our grief. Who coaxes life from what we were certain was dead. And then, as the novelist Marilynne Robinson writes of grace, it simply “arrives.” Not announced. Not argued. He speaks her name: “Mary.” That is the whole of Easter, isn’t it? One word. One name. Everything changes. Notice what both gardens offer us: a choice. In Eden, Adam heard God coming and hid. Fear was his first response to Love. In the Easter garden, Mary heard her name and turned. She ran — not away, but toward. The poet Wendell Berry says: “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.” Both Adam and Mary had reached the end of what they knew. One flinched. One turned. The difference was not their worthiness. The difference was the name they heard. No matter which garden we find ourselves in today — the garden of our hiding, or the garden of our grief — God meets us there. In our vulnerability, not our performance. In our natural environment, not a cleaned-up version of it. Easter is not merely a date on the calendar. It is an invitation. Like Lazarus stumbling from the tomb, still wrapped in grave clothes, we are called to let ourselves be unbound. The fears, the old stories, the shame we have carried so long we have forgotten it is not our skin — these are linen wrappings. The Risen Christ does not ask us to have shed them already. He asks us to come out while still wearing them, and he will take it from there. Frederick Buechner wrote: “The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.” You were called by name this morning. That call will tremble outward. It always does. The stone is already rolled away. The gardener is standing in the morning light, saying your name. The only question left is the one that matters most: Will you come out? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com

    8 min

  5. Mar 30

    Letting Jesus Turn One Table Today!

    On Holy Monday, I sit with one of the most jarring scenes in the Gospels. Jesus enters the Temple — the holiest place in Jerusalem — and what he finds there is not worship. It is a marketplace. Merchants hawking animals. Money changers turning profit from pilgrims. The sacred has been colonized by the transactional, and I am struck by how deeply I recognize this — not only in history, but in the institutions of my own time, and if I am honest, in myself. Jesus overturns the tables. Not calmly. Not apologetically. He acts from righteous anger — the anger of love confronting betrayal. And I hear his words as if they are spoken directly into the noise of my own life: “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers.” I believe this is what the Lord is asking me to see today. The exploitation of the sacred is not only a first-century problem. When the Church — when I — allow what is holy to be crowded out by power, performance, or self-protection, the tables need overturning still. So many people are disoriented because the places meant to offer refuge became places of transaction. I feel that disorientation too. And I believe the Lord is inviting me, on this Holy Monday, to let him in to do the same work in me. “The soul is the temple of God. If you defile that temple, God will destroy you — not out of vengeance, but because what is corrupted cannot house what is holy.” — St. John Chrysostom This lands heavily with me. Because I, too, am a temple. St. Paul writes that my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within me. And if that is true, then the question the Lord presses upon me today is one I cannot avoid: what has crept into the temple of my heart that does not belong there? When I look honestly within, I find my own money changers. Resentments I have nursed for years. Anxieties I have mistaken for wisdom. Distractions I invited in and never asked to leave. The low hum of bitterness, the clutter of false identities, the noise of a life that has slowly, without my fully noticing, become very crowded. These are loud. They take up space. And I know they make it harder for me to hear the still, small voice of God. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless, until it rests in you.” — St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions Augustine names what I feel. When my interior life feels like a crowded market — noisy, exhausting, never quite at peace — I am beginning to understand that this restlessness is a signal. Something has taken up space that belongs to God alone. Holy Monday does not ask me to be perfect. It asks me to be honest. And I believe the Lord is asking me today to name what tables need overturning in me. Jesus did not destroy the Temple. He restored it to its purpose. That is what I believe he wants to do in me. Not to condemn me, but to clear me. Not to shame me, but to sanctify me. A house of prayer is not an empty house — it is a house filled with the right Presence. And I want that. I want to be that. A Question for Holy Monday Sit in stillness for a moment. Ask yourself: What in my life has turned the temple of my heart into a marketplace? What is taking up sacred space that belongs to God alone? What one thing, if cleared away, would make more room for prayer, for rest, for love? I do not have to clear everything at once. I only need to begin. Let Jesus turn one table today. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com

    7 min

  6. Mar 28

    What Lasts Forever?

    The Hunger We All Share Let me be honest with you — I feel it too. The quiet ache for something that will not slip through my fingers. You may have felt it standing in a home you love, wondering how long you will be able to keep it. Or sitting across from someone dear to you, silently hoping this — this person, this warmth, this moment — will somehow stay. We are creatures who crave permanence in a world that seems allergic to it. We upgrade our phones knowing there is already a newer model in a lab somewhere. We buy cars and watch them age. We build families and grieve when they scatter. We are living in an age of breathtaking, relentless change — and if we are truthful, it is exhausting. The world moves fast, and the fear of being left behind is very real. Technology does not wait. Culture does not pause. And yet, deep in the human soul, there is this ancient, stubborn longing: we want something to last. This is not weakness. This is not nostalgia. This is something God placed in us — a homing signal pointed toward eternity. There Is Something That Lasts The scriptures speak directly into this hunger. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:20-23). Read that again slowly. Never ceases. Never. Not slowing down, not being replaced by a newer version, not contingent on how well you have kept up with the times. God’s love is not a product. It does not depreciate. The psalmist declares, “His steadfast love endures forever” — and remarkably, that phrase appears over two dozen times in Psalm 136 alone, as if God is saying: in case you missed it, let me say it again. And again. And again. This is not accidental repetition. It is pastoral reassurance for people just like you and me, people who live surrounded by things that fade. Here is what moves me most: God’s love is described as both eternal and new every morning. It does not grow stale. It is permanent and fresh simultaneously. In a world that forces us to choose between the reliable and the relevant, God’s love refuses that false choice. It is the one thing in the universe that is both. But How Do We Actually Experience This? This is the pastoral question that matters most, isn’t it? It is one thing to say God’s love is eternal. It is another to feel it on a Tuesday morning when the news is bad and your anxiety is high. So how do we move from knowing this truth to living inside it? First, we must practise returning. Every morning is a mercy — and mercy, by its nature, must be received, not just acknowledged. Try beginning each day with a simple, honest prayer: “God, your love is new this morning. Help me receive it.” Not a long prayer. Not a polished prayer. Just an open hand. Second, we must learn to notice. Where has God’s steadfast love shown up in the last twenty-four hours? In a conversation that surprised you with kindness? In a moment of unexpected peace? In the fact that you woke up at all? Gratitude is not a spiritual nicety — it is the practice of training our eyes to see what is lasting underneath what is changing. Third, we must sit with scripture differently. Let Lamentations 3 or Psalm 136 wash over you not as information, but as a letter from someone who loves you. Read it aloud. Let it speak to the part of you that is tired of things not lasting. Now — Become the Permanence Someone Else Needs Here is the invitation I want to leave with you, and I say it as a challenge as much as an encouragement: the world around us is changing at a pace that leaves people disoriented and lonely. People are hungry for something steady. You can be that for them. When you are rooted in a love that does not change, you become a person whose presence is itself a gift. You are not swept away by every cultural tide. You do not love people only when it is convenient. You show up — again, and again, and again. You become, in a small but profound way, a living sign of God’s steadfast love. Practically, this looks like keeping your word even when it costs you. It looks like being the friend who checks in a month after the crisis, not just the week of. It looks like resisting the urge to move on from people who are slow to change or heal. It looks like being present — unhurried, undistracted, genuinely there. The world does not need more noise or more novelty. It needs more people who are not going anywhere. More people who love like God loves — persistently, tenderly, new every morning. So here is my gentle challenge to you this week: Receive God’s love as something new each morning — not just a doctrine, but a daily gift. Notice where permanence already shows up in your life, and give thanks for it. Choose one person this week and be steadfast toward them in a specific, practical way. In a world that is always changing, let us be anchored in the one thing that never does. And from that anchor, let us become a lasting presence for the people around us. His steadfast love endures forever. And so can ours. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com

    12 min

  7. Mar 15

    Seen by God, Sent with Purpose

    I. THE GOD WHO SEES WHAT OTHERS MISS There is a field outside Bethlehem where a young man tends his father’s sheep. He smells of livestock and dust. He is sunburned and overlooked.His own father did not think to call him when the prophet Samuel arrived. And yet — God said, “This is the one.” In 1 Samuel 16, when Samuel comes to Jesse’s house to anoint the next king of Israel, he surveys seven impressive sons — tall, strong, ready. And every time, God says no. Then Samuel asks, “Are these all the sons you have?” And Jesse, almost as an afterthought, mentions David — the youngest, the shepherd, the forgotten one. God’s response is one of the most powerful lines in all of Scripture: “The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” God saw David before anyone else did. And God sees you, too — not as the world sees you, but as He made you. “God does not call the qualified. He qualifies the called.” — Max Lucado Max Lucado reminds us that God’s method of choosing people has never been about credentials or competence.d It has always been about willingness, availability, and a heart turned toward Him. David was not ready to be a king. He was ready to be faithful. And God honored that. II. THE DANGER OF FORGETTING HOW WE WERE FOUND Here is the truth we must hold carefully: none of us are fully prepared for the mantle God places upon us. No one wakes up fully equipped to be a prophet, a priest, an apostle, or a teacher. We step into these roles trembling, uncertain, aware of our limitations. And that is exactly where God wants us. Because when we remember that we were chosen — not discovered — we remain humble. When we forget it, we become proud. When we lose sight of the field where God found us, we begin to act as though we built the throne ourselves. There is a story told of a young minister who, early in his calling, kept a piece of dusty old cloth in his Bible — a fragment from the worn shirt he wore the day he first preached. When people would praise him, he would quietly open his Bible, look at the cloth, and remember: “I was just a shepherd once. God came to me.” That small act of remembrance kept his heart soft for decades. Pride says: “I achieved this.” Humility says: “I was chosen for this, and I am still learning how to carry it.” Let us be people of holy humility. III. THE MAN BORN BLIND: WHEN ANOINTING OPENS OUR EYES In John 9, we meet a man who has never seen a sunrise. He has never looked into the face of someone he loves. His whole life, people have debated the cause of his blindness rather than addressing the reality of his pain. Even the disciples ask Jesus: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Jesus reframes everything. He says: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned. This happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” Notice what Jesus does next. He makes mud — simple, earthy, unremarkable mud. He anoints the man’s eyes with it. He sends him to wash in the Pool of Siloam. And the man comes back seeing. This is not just a healing story. This is a story about anointed purpose bringing clarity. The man did not know who Jesus was when his eyes were opened. But as the story unfolds, his sight deepens — first he sees a man named Jesus, then a prophet, then the Son of God. Each encounter brought greater revelation. “We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Teilhard de Chardin understood that the interior life is the truest life. The blind man’s physical healing was a doorway to something far more profound — the recognition of who Jesus truly is. And that is the invitation for every one of us. IV. RECOGNIZING OUR OWN BLIND SPOTS The most sobering figures in John 9 are not the blind man’s neighbors. They are the Pharisees. They have full use of their physical eyes. They can read the Torah. They can argue theology with precision. And yet they cannot see what is right in front of them. They choose not to. Jesus says something striking at the end of this passage: “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” The Pharisees ask, “Surely we are not blind?” And Jesus answers: “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.” The most dangerous blindness is the blindness that does not know it is blind. It is the kind that comes from certainty without surrender. It is the kind that comes from religion without relationship. Friends, we all have blind spots. Places in our lives where we have not yet asked God to open our eyes. Assumptions we hold about our own calling, our own limitations, our own worth. Perhaps today is the day the mud touches your eyes. Perhaps today is the day you walk to the pool and wash. V. RECOGNIZING GOD’S HAND IN DAILY LIFE David did not become king overnight. Between the anointing in that farmhouse and the throne in Jerusalem, there were years of waiting, wilderness, and war. But throughout all of it, the Spirit of the Lord was upon him. And David learned to recognize God’s hand in each season. To lead a fulfilled life — an effective life — we must develop eyes to see God at work in the ordinary. In the shepherd’s field. In the muddy pool. In the quiet morning before the battle. In the conversation that shifts everything. Recognizing God’s hand is not a passive act. It is a discipline. It is the practice of pausing, of paying attention, of asking — “Where is God in this moment?” It is the difference between a life that is merely lived and a life that is truly led. VI. THE INVITATION: WILL YOU BE FOUND? You may be standing in a field right now. You may feel overlooked, unprepared, unqualified. You may be carrying a blindness you haven’t named yet. You may be wondering whether God has a purpose for someone like you. The answer, always and without exception, is yes. God chose a shepherd boy and made him a king. God chose a blind man and made him a witness. God chooses ordinary people with ordinary lives and does extraordinary things through them — not because they are ready, but because He is faithful. Embrace your unique calling. Trust that the God who anointed David will equip you. Trust that the Jesus who opened blind eyes can open yours. Come to Him with your limitations, your uncertainties, your unfinished story. He has seen you from the beginning. He has not overlooked you. He has been waiting for you. The Spirit of the Lord is upon you. Will you rise and answer the call? Amen. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com

    14 min

  8. Mar 14

    God in the Darkness: The Dark Night of the Soul

    We live in a world unrecognizable from even a year ago. Wars rage across continents, people flee their homes in desperate waves, and uncertainty hangs over the future like a storm that will not break. In times like these, the human heart naturally cries out: Where is God? But before we look outward for answers, we must look inward — because much of the turmoil we see in our world is, painfully, self-inflicted. We behave poorly toward one another. We fail to recognize the faces across from us — across the border, across the aisle, across the street — as our brothers and sisters. We have forgotten our shared humanity. We build walls where we should build bridges, and we wage wars where we should wage peace. The displacement of peoples, the fracturing of nations, the cruelty we inflict on one another — these are not merely the consequences of political failures. They are the consequences of spiritual ones. Mother Teresa understood this with piercing clarity. She taught that the reason there is no peace in the world is because there is no peace within ourselves and within our homes. Peace is not first a political achievement — it is a personal one. It begins at the kitchen table, in the marriage bed, in the way a parent speaks to a child. When the interior life is disordered, the exterior world reflects that disorder. The chaos we see globally is, in many ways, the sum total of our private brokenness multiplied across billions of lives. This is why the dark night of the soul, as described by St. John of the Cross, is far more than a spiritual concept confined to monasteries and prayer rooms. It is a physical concept and a lived reality. It plays out in refugee camps and bombed-out cities. It lives in the grief of a mother who has lost a child to violence, in the despair of a man who has lost his home, his country, his dignity. The darkness is not abstract — it has an address, a face, a body that aches. St. John of the Cross described the soul’s passage through desolation not as punishment but as purification — a stripping away of everything false so that what is true and eternal might remain. That process is happening not just in individual souls today, but collectively, in civilizations. We are being invited, perhaps forced, to examine what we have built and why it keeps collapsing. St. Teresa of Ávila, in The Interior Castle, described the soul passing through shadowed and disorienting rooms before reaching the innermost chamber where God dwells in perfect peace. The journey inward is not a retreat from the world — it is the most urgent work for the world. Because a person who has found interior peace carries that peace outward. A home rooted in love becomes a community rooted in love. And communities rooted in love do not start wars. What St. John, St. Teresa, and Mother Teresa all understood is this: the darkness — whether of the soul or of the world — is not the end of the story. It is an invitation. God does not cause our suffering, but He enters it. He walks in the rubble with us, closer than breath, faithful when all else crumbles. The night of our world is long. But it is not without God. And it will not last forever. Yet waiting is not enough — we all have a part to play in ending the darkness, both within ourselves and in the world we live in. That responsibility is mutual, personal, and corporate. It belongs to each of us and to all of us together. Let us pray that in this season of penance and prayer, that is precisely what we choose to do. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com

    10 min
See All (31)

About

Invitation to a Loving, Living & Life-Giving Walk with Christ! bishopjos.substack.com

Information