At a Mass on Tuesday morning I heard the gospel reading for the day. It had no special effect on me at the time. Maybe my mind wandered as it was being read as it's inclined to do frequently. That evening I wandered over to one of my favorite websites where I get some of my spiritual energy. The site is entitled “Today's Good News” (http://goodnews.ie/index.shtml).
It is a Dominican website out of Ireland. I wandered over to the Gospel Commentary link and read the commentary for this reading. I thought it might be a good way to introduce you to the site if I reproduced a portion of the insights I gained by reading it. Following is some of the commentary. The site has other very different pages to explore. Enjoy.
The Word became flesh: took on our human nature and became one of us. He is fully human and belongs here. Yet in this passage he says, “I am not of this world.” How are we to understand this?
The ‘world’ in John's gospel is not the physical world, but all the forces in human life that oppose the Kingdom of God – in other words, all the forces that originate in the human head. The great enemy of the Gospel is the alternative world we invent for ourselves, in which we ourselves are the centre of everything. The ego is a world-conqueror. Its story, its personal history, takes the place of the history of the world. It cannot be one with anything. When it looks at anything it sees only how alien and different it is. It sees good in things and in people only insofar as they appear to support its claims, or at least to tolerate them. This is what Jesus means by “this world”, not our beloved blue planet but the human ego that closes its eyes to everything but itself.
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