Saturday August 2, 2025

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“This fiftieth year you shall make sacred by proclaiming liberty in the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you.” (From today’s first reading)

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Good News Reflection for:

Saturday of the 17th Week of Ordinary Time
August 2, 2025

Today’s Readings:

Leviticus 25:1, 8-17
Psalm 67:2-3, 5, 7-8
Matthew 14: 1-12
bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080225.cfm
Podcast:
bible.usccb.org/podcasts/audio/daily-mass-reading-podcast-august-2-2025

How safe do you feel today?

John the Baptizer preached, “Make straight the way of the Lord” (see John 1:23). To anyone living in Israel at the time, this was a message of safety. Today, we tend to see it only as a call to take no detours on our journey of faith.

In John’s time, as it was for Isaiah whom he quoted (“make straight in the desert a highway for our God” from Isaiah 40:3), the roads or highways were paths that had been forged by previous generations. They were not straight because travelers had to wend their way around hills and dunes. However, danger lurked behind every mound because they might be hiding a thief or an enemy ready to pounce. So, travelers made wide sweeps through potentially dangerous areas, always keeping in view the far side of the hills, allowing themselves room for evasive action.

They took the safest route. Not the shortest route. Heading straight through the area could have been disastrous. So, when Isaiah and John declared that people should make a straight way to the Lord, they were declaring that the Lord was safe.

The path to Heaven is the journey of becoming a little child who sleeps without fear in the Father’s arms. How safe do you feel with God the Father? Are you able to climb up onto his lap and into his arms to feel his protective concern for you? He wants you to feel his powerful arms wrapping around you and creating a zone of extreme peace with you at the center.

No one is loved fully in any human relationship. This is a normal flaw of the human condition. And it’s the source of much of our anguish. Because we project onto God what we’ve learned from humans, it’s difficult (though not impossible) to fully believe that God loves us completely in every possible way despite our own flaws. It’s especially difficult if we hold within us any misconceptions about how safe God is.

To feel closer to the Father’s heart of parental love for you, it’s very healing to see Jesus as not only a Mediator but as your pathway to the Father.

Jesus wants to help you go straight to the Father’s parental heart so you will know how very dear you are to him. Jesus knows that this will fill in the gaps of your human parents’ imperfect, insufficient love. He wants you to be able to climb up onto the Father’s lap and feel the safety and security of his concern for you. He wants you to feel his powerful arms wrapping around you and creating a zone of extreme peace with you at the center.

The above is an excerpt from my book The Father’s Heart. Get your copy now from tothefathersheart.com.

© 2025 by Terry A. Modica

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