Wednesday 5th week of Lent
"Jn 8:31-42"
Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." They answered him, "We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one. How is it that you say, 'You will be made free'?" Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin".
There is the story of a farmer who found an egg in an eagle's nest. He took it and put it with his chickens. In time an eagle-chick hatched together with the other younglings. This eagle learned the chicken customs: walking through the yard, eating worms... Sometimes he would climb up on to a fence and crash to the ground, crying out, just as chickens do. That yard was his world and he was happy in there.
Sinners are like that eagle. They are locked in their vices but they don't know they are imprisoned. They don't know there is a whole world behind the fence and they can pass over that fence because they are meant to fly. But one day, the story goes, the eagle-chick saw a bird soaring through the skies. "Who is that?" he asked. And one of the chickens beside him answered, "It is an eagle that flies majestically, without any effort. But don't look at it any more! Do not look at it, because our life is not like hers; our life is here, in the barnyard."
The story can finish in two ways: 1) the eagle spent the rest of his life in the barn learning to cluck and flutter; or else 2) after trying many, many times, one day - a day he would never forget - he managed to fly, soaring up to the skies. Every sinner has those two options: to remain in their sins and defects without trying to overcome them, as if that were their only reality - or to try to fly. There is a truth that they need to know, a truth that will set them free: They are created to soar to the heights!
Mary, my Mother, help me to encourage people never to settle for living a mediocre life, to remind them that (with the grace of the Sacraments) they will never "flutter about like a hen, when they can soar to the heights of an eagle" (St JosemarÃa).
