In today’s First Reading James encourages the first Christians not to complain about each other, using the prophets and Job as examples to follow and warning them that if one party goes on trial seeking justice, both parties go on trial before the just Judge. Job and the prophets may seem to have complained at times about the situation in which they lived, but the true cause for their glory was\u00a0that they suffered for the sake of truth.<\/p>\n
Job suffered one tragedy after the other in his life, but other than asking why and arguing with his friends about whether it was God’s punishment for something he’d done (it wasn’t), Job never blamed God or denounced him for the evil he had suffered. Prophets almost invariably clashed with the political authorities of their time, since they’d been sent by the Lord with an unwelcome\u00a0message, but they didn’t quit in the face of injustice or hardship.<\/p>\n
When you\u00a0are suffering,\u00a0when times are difficult, remember that perseverance is precious in the eyes of God, and that is more important than anything your neighbor may have done to you.<\/p>\n
Readings:\u00a0James 5:9\u201312;\u00a0Psalm 103:1\u20134, 8\u20139, 11\u201312;\u00a0Mark 10:1\u201312.<\/em> See also 19th Week in Ordinary Time, Friday<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a027th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In today’s First Reading James encourages the first Christians not to complain about each other, using the prophets and Job as examples to follow and warning them that if one party goes on trial seeking justice, both parties go on trial before the just Judge. Job and the prophets may seem to have complained at … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[45,41,10,146],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ordinary-time","tag-seventh-week","tag-thursday","tag-year-ii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p65qtw-lC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1342,"href":"http:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions\/1342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}