One day, as a small child, Thomas Edison came home from school
and gave a paper to his mother. He said to her “Mom, my teacher gave this paper
to me and told me only you are to read it. What does it say?”
Her eyes welled with tears as she read the letter out loud to
her child …
“Your son is a genius. This school is too small for him and
doesn’t have good enough teachers to train him. Please teach him yourself.”
Many years after Edison’s mother had died, he became one of the
greatest inventors of the century.
One day he was going through a closet and he found the folded
letter that his old teacher wrote his Mother that day. He opened it …
The message written on the letter was “Your son is mentally
deficient. We cannot let him attend our school anymore. He is expelled.”
Edison became emotional reading it and then wrote in his diary:
“Thomas A. Edison was a mentally deficient child whose mother
turned him into the genius of the Century.”
My dear friends, this story makes us reflect that in giving one person
a chance, change for the better may happen to his life. This is somehow the
teaching which our Gospel from Luke 13:1-9 tells us too when Jesus taught those
who surrounded him how God gave chances to people who are spiritually deficient
and even called public sinners. It is said that there were people who told
Jesus how they judged and condemned the Galileans whose blood Pilate had
mingled with their sacrifices. But Jesus answered them that it is not how God
judges people. Despite their weakness and sinfulness, God gives chances to
people to change their ways for the better. This is clear in the parable which
Jesus used to illustrate how God judges his people saying, “Let it alone, sir,
this year also, till I dig about it and put on manure. And if it bears fruit
next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” We are reminded
then by this Gospel that as long as we live, we take this as a chance to
improve our lives especially our spiritual lives. Amen.
