Today’s first reading from the prophet Jeremiah gives us the
image of God as the potter. It suggests that
we are all a work in progress. God can take what comes out wrong in our lives and reshape it into something good. God may have begun a good work in us but He has not yet to brought it to completion.
“The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.” God is also the creator-God who is constantly at work to bring good out of evil and new life out of what comes out wrong in us.
Judgement belongs to God, to be carried out in his time. As human beings, we would be wise to
take it very slowly in trying to take on God’s work of separating the good from the evil. As Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians,
“Do not pronounce judgement before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness.”
In the Gospel, there seems to be the same theme: I think can be summed up in these words:
Embrace Diversity OR
There is unity in diversity. The parable of the dragnet cast into the sea suggests that at the end of time there will be a separation of the good from the bad. But this is God’s work and it will happen in God’s time. We often make the mistake of thinking that it is our work, that it should happen when we want it to happen.
We have all experienced this. We can be prone to deciding who is good and who is bad here and now and we then behave in light of that judgement. When we make such a judgement, chances are we are going to get it wrong.
We see the good in ourselves more easily than the good in others and the bad in others more easily than the bad in ourselves. We often fail to appreciate that people can change for the better, with God’s help – that I can change, I need to change.
God, open my heart today to see others as you see them.