Will you sing?

The refrain from today’s psalm is “I will sing of your salvation.” Will you? If you are the average Catholic your answer might be “yes” but I wonder what you answer would be if the question was “Will you sing of your salvation outside of Mass or your shower?”  Granted we all sound great in the shower, but we are more reluctant to sing at all apart from the choir of the faithful or our personal Niagara Falls.

Are you willing to sing of your salvation, to give witness, in the public forum when all eyes are upon you? How about in the local WalMart or Wegmans? Your average Catholic only needs to stand next to a born-again, evangelical Christian to understand how private we are about our life in faith.  Of course, you’re thinking, “All that public praying and witnessing, that’s their thing. Our faith is more discrete, more private, more, well…… more sophisticated than asking someone in the local WalMart if they had been saved. Ours is a faith steeped in tradition, liturgy, sacraments. This is how we serve the Lord.” 

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Jesus on Trial

Where in the scene of Peter’s Denial (Luke 22:54-65), the focus and center of the narrative was Peter, here the focus returns to Jesus. In this trial (hearing, meeting) by the religious authorities of Jerusalem, the role of Jesus as prophet and Messiah is at the forefront of the narrative. Jesus had foretold the primary events of this scene—both Peter’s threefold denial before the crowing of the cock (v. 34; vv. 56–61) and his own maltreatment (esp. 18:32; cf. 20:10–11 and 22:63–65).

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