DON’T MISS OUT!

Monday: July 6, 2020

Reference: Matthew 9:18-26

Matthew 9:18 While he spake these things unto them, behold, there came a certain ruler, and worshipped him, saying, My daughter is even now dead: but come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live.

Where do you stand with God? I throw this question out there because three descriptive come to mind: certainty, improbability and impossibility. The synagogue official was clearly a man who knew no impossibilities for he walks up to Jesus and invites him to come and raise her dead daughter. He acknowledged from the very onset that while it was true his daughter was dead, he remained convinced that she would live when Jesus lays hands on her. That is the highest step: ‘the place of certainty- absolute trust’.

Then we have the ‘ridiculing crowd’: that crowd from Matthew 9:24 described as noisy and disorderly (9:23), whom after hearing Jesus say ‘The little girl isn’t dead, she is just asleep,’ laughed at Him to their hearts’ content. This audience understood and inferred one word from the many Jesus spoke, they saw ‘impossibility’. Not even improbability, where there was a lower likelihood of occurrence, they went straight for the jugular. Therefore, they set their foot down and picked their stance: ‘No way is this girl coming back to life, that is just the talk of a mad man’.

I remember a 2013 NBA finals game where fans left 30 seconds to the end of time only to miss their team rally from behind to win the match. Their impossible ‘conclusion’ caused them to miss out on a piece of sporting history
Like the crowd in today’s Gospel, they wrote the conclusion to the effect that ‘this cannot or will not happen’, no way! But surprise, it happened right then only that they were outside and so missed this extraordinary sight.

Beloved, when we see impossibility, we are not even bothered to try, to wait or to acknowledge, and that simply means we will certainly not have the opportunity to see all we could. That is why impossible is one word that does not exist in the vocabulary of heaven, and its about time we took it out of ours too.

#sly