SECOND WEEK OF LENT YEAR C, TUESDAY

In the Gospel, Jesus says that He knows we need a teacher, but He doesn’t want us to pick the wrong one. Those who teach or preach and do not practice what they preach, as Jesus says of the Pharisees, have chosen the wrong teacher themselves.

We surely need good teachers. With our World’s problems as bad as they are, we need excellent teachers, who can show us the way to go in solving the problems. We have all kinds of teachers and experts who claim to have the solutions to the World’s problems. But how successful are they?

Instead of stability and order, we have broken homes, divorce, crime, broken lives, emotional illness, and many problems that breed an atmosphere of confusion, sin and violence. If anything, the news media make us hardened to these evils, so that we begin to accept them as unavoidable. We breathe the foul air unknowingly. But the evil is there, and great loneliness and fear result. A teenager said, “I don’t have one real friend” Many people feel this way.

Drugs and Alcohol are attempts to escape the problem. But they only deepen it. The result is insecurity, fear of the future, and lack of direction, people don’t know where to go or what to do.

We have the Lord’s own words in the Gospel; Only one is your teacher: The Messiah. Only one is your Father: God, your Father in Heaven” Only there will you find your solutions. It is the Lord, and only He, who can solve our problems.

So Josiah writes, “I, the Lord, teach you what is good. If you listen to me, your prosperity will flow like a river”

The power to cure our ills is given to us, but we must accept Jesus totally to experience His power!

This is our real problem, we put all kinds of obstacles in the Lord’s way! We try to find easy substitutes for Christ, but they don’t work.

Lord Jesus, you are the answer – if we would only give You a chance to show us!

Reflection by

Rev. Fr. Fredrick Kiwanuka
@Christ the King Parish, Kampala