March 22, 2015: The Fifth Sunday of Lent
Jeremiah 31:31-34 : I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. … All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.
Psalm 51: Create a clean heart in me, O God.
Hebrews 5:7-9: Son though he was [Christ Jesus] learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.
John 12:2-33: Jesus answered them: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be gloried. Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. … Now is the time of judgment on this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And when I am lifted up from thee earth, I will draw everyone to myself.”
Optional RCIA readings from Year A: Ezekiel 37:12-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:8-11; and 11:1-45 (Lazarus).
Next Sunday is Palm Sunday, and Holy Week begins.
Diane’s Reflection for March 22, 2015
Flunking Lent, again
Sometimes it seems like I write pretty much the same thing, over and over. I think that’s because I tend to do the same thing, over and over, as well. And so here we are, the Fifth Sunday of Lent, and it looks like I blew it. Again. Another Holy Season is sputtering to its conclusion, and I am no holier or wiser or better now than I was back before it all started. All my fine resolutions have gone the way of so many of my other fine resolutions, and I am standing here now, just a week before Holy Week, the same wobbly, flawed and half-hearted person that I was six weeks ago, on Ash Wednesday. It’s a good thing I’m Catholic, or I wouldn’t know what to do with all the vague spiritual guilt I feel. Because I really was so sure that I was going to do it, this Lent: somehow batter my way through the stubborn wall that keeps me away from my God.
Of course, I know that all the walls are really on the inside, in my own heart; and I also know that it’s less a question of me breaking through to God, than of me shutting up and sitting down and getting out of the way, so that God can get through to me. I also know that there is always a door in the wall, and that the only knob for opening it is right here, with me, on my side of reality. But I am the kind of person who is always losing things, like glasses and hats and keys; even the doorknob on my front door has been known to fall out, unexpectedly, and leave me standing there with it in my hand, staring helplessly at the blank unwelcoming front of my own house. Doors are always trickier to go through than they look. I think that’s why I’m struck by the dramatic vision of God blasting through the rubble of my walls, in glorious, cinematic slow-motion, much like the wonderful sonnet by John Donne that begins Batter my heart, three-personed God.
It should be noted that Donne is not referring to baseball, when he talks about batter. No, he’s working from a premise that I understand very well, which is that some of us have shut ourselves off so thoroughly from God that we don’t even remember how to open our own door; in fact, we can’t even tell you where the darn thing is located. All we know is that we’re stuck down here, on the other side of things, hunkered deep in the basement of the soul. There’s a point at which all you can do is wave a white flag and say, “I surrender, God, I give up; tear my whole life down, if you have to, to get inside me again.” “Lent” is one of the names for doing this. And I started Lent this year, with such enthusiasm. I even had a Welcome Parade for Jesus planned, with tickertape and everything, for when he finally took over the city of my life. I was going to give him the Keys of my City, in a special ceremony. Assuming I could find them.
But, once again, I got side-tracked. And all my plans for daily centering prayer and serious fasting and even more serious spiritual reading and daily Mass attendance and saying the rosary and going to Stations of the Cross every week instead of every other week and giving extra alms and everything else – well, they all sort of spluttered out like a half-dead firecracker, until before I knew it, it was the Fifth Week of Lent, and I had lost track of everything. Yep, I blew it again. Another Lent, come and gone.
Or is it? Who said Lent has to end with Palm Sunday? Aren’t our whole lives, here on this earth, a kind of Lenten practice – leading us, one step at a time, to our own share in the Resurrection? What, after all, was it that distracted me from my Lenten schedule this year? Well, I guess you could say it’s just been everyday life – the everyday, ordinary, and difficult stuff that all of us have to put up with. All of us face financial worries and job insecurities and health problems of various sorts; the basic daily pressures of doing dishes and laundry and paying bills and looking after kids and pets and spouses and other family members. And the much harder stuff, as well – dealing with the heartbreakingly serious troubles and illnesses of those we truly care about, and especially with the deaths of people we love. Just getting through the days is sometimes tougher than you’d ever thought it could be. Which makes it hard, sometimes, to feel spiritual and holy. We forget that Jesus had a tough time on earth as well; after all, he slept on the ground and died on lumber. Holiness, in other words, is physical as well as spiritual; and sometimes the holiest thing we can do is just get through the day, in love and kindness.
And that’s one of the reasons I always fail at my more dramatic Lenten resolutions. Life itself gets in the way of everything I plan to do – and I bet your life is even more complicated than mine is. I guess you could say that life actually is Lent, without all the purple hangings. Which means maybe that I haven’t really blown it yet, because the journey is still in progress. Lent is never truly over. Not while life continues. – Diane Sylvain
God puts you where God needs you. You are where you are supposed to be. The job you are doing may not be any easier on account of this, indeed it may be harder, even more urgent, but now you are centered, focused, clear. So this is where I am supposed to be. I always thought I was supposed to be somewhere else, doing something else, being someone else. But I realized that I was mistaken. This does not mean that I can’t or will not be doing something else. Just right now, I am where God wants me to be. – Lawrence Kushner
INTERUPTIONS: OUR REAL WORK
Henri Nouwen once commented that he used to be resentful whenever he was interrupted in his work until he realized that, often times, interruptions were his real work.
There’s a lesson here: We’re often resentful when our plans are interrupted. Sometimes these interruptions are minor, an unexpected phone call while we’re working or watching television. Sometimes though they’re major:… a family situation that prevents us from pursuing a dream, or a loss of health that puts everything on hold.
Countless things, big and small, perennially conspire against our agendas and sabotage our dreams. Often we’re resentful and think to ourselves: “If only! If only this hadn’t happened! “ … [But sometimes] what initially is experienced as an unwanted interruption can, in the end, be our real agenda.
Of course, this isn’t always true. Our lives are not meant to be left entirely to circumstance. We’re meant too to make choices, hard choices at times, to actively shape our own destiny. It can be unhealthy, fatalistic even, to simply accept whatever happens. …We have God- given dreams and talents and must, in the name of the God who gave them to us, fight too for our agenda.
However, we must also look for the hand of that God in our interruptions. … a conspiracy of accidents through which God guides and tutors us. If we were totally in control of our own agendas, if we could simply plan and execute our lives according to our own dreams with no unwanted demands, I fear that many of us would, slowly and subtly, become selfish and would, also slowly and imperceptibly, find our lives devoid of simple joy, enthusiasm, family life, and real community.
Baptism means derailment. Christ baptizes Peter on the rock when he tells him: “Your life is now no longer your own. Before you made a profession of love, you fastened your belt and walked wherever you liked. Now, others will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go.” To submit to love is to be baptized, namely, to let our lives be forever interrupted. To not let our lives be interrupted is to say no to love.
C.S. Lewis once said that we’ll spend most of eternity thanking God for those prayers he didn’t answer. I suspect we’ll also spend a good part of eternity thanking God for those interruptions that derailed our plans but baptized us into life and love in a way we could never have ourselves planned or accomplished. – Fr. Ronald Rolheiser,OMI
Scripture Notes from the Sourcebook:
THE FIRST READING: The new life we are promised is not individualized deliverance but deliverance from the isolation of our sin into the embrace of the new covenant forged in Christ and written in our hearts by the Paschal gift of the Holy Spirit breathed out by God upon a world renewed by the Death and Resurrection of Jesus. Love for one another will be its fruit and its sign, for love is the law and gift of the new covenant in Christ’s blood.
RESPONSORIAL PSALM 51 is considered one of the most beautiful penitential psalms of the Scriptures. As we pray it this day, it is appropriate to join our own need for divine forgiveness and compassion with the needs of our ancestors in faith. With the psalmist, the Hebrew people beg the Lord for the gift of forgiveness. They yearn for a clean slate, forgiveness of sins, and a new beginning. Remembering the promise of the New Covenant, they ask for clean hearts. They know they need a fresh start and they know they need the Spirit’s daily presence to help them make that start and succeed. In return, they will teach sinners the way of the Lord.
SECOND READING: The promise of a new covenant, or a covenant renewed, fills us with hope, but the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us of its cost, both for Christ and for us. Obedience even unto death, death on a cross, is the only road from dead fruitlessness to a harvest of living wheat, ready to be baked into life-giving bread.
THE GOSPEL: Christ himself is the grain of wheat buried in the earth to rise again and bear much fruit for all who have been willing to follow him through the deaths of Lent, small or great, to the light of the newly risen son. The wheat harvest, ripened in that sun, will yield bread for all the hungry. We who have been fed on the life-giving Bread that is Christ can then in turn feed the world in which we have been planted. Lent and Easter and never only about the self but always about the whole humanity to which we belong.—2015 Sourcebook for Sundays, Seasons & Weekends
The Source of Our Joy
In today’s gospel reading we hear the moving words of Jesus, referring to himself as the grain of wheat that must fall into the ground and die if there is to be a harvest. If he were to save his own life he would remain only a single individual among all the individuals in the world. He did not give lectures or a little charity; he gave his life, his life’s blood – he gave himself. This is true of Jesus, but it is to become true of every disciple of his as well. We give little or nothing unless we give ourselves.
The ego, the false self, has no trouble giving lectures; it thrives on its own words. It has no trouble giving a little charity; that can even enhance its own self-image. But it cannot really give itself; it cannot fall into the ground and die. Only our true self, which is God's gift and not of our own making, can live from the heart and give itself away for the good of others. “Many a person appears to give,” said Meister Eckhart, “but in reality gives nothing at all. These are people who give… where they obtain some service for their gift, or where they are given something in return, or where they expect to be honoured. Such people's gifts can more properly be called begging than giving, for in truth they give nothing. Our Lord Jesus Christ… continued suffering and giving himself for true love until his death.” Without this kind of giving, the Christian community would not be a community at all but only a collection of egos in competition. The new covenant is the covenant in the heart.
–Donagh O’Shea, from Today’s Good News, the website of the Irish Dominicans ____________________________________________________________
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgment not be too heavy upon us….
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
Pray for us sinners now and the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death. ---T. S. Eliot, from “Ash Wednesday”
A DIFFICULT MERCY
Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson (his estranged grandson). He saw that no Sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.
– Flannery O’Connor, from her short story “The Artificial Negro”
No matter how far we have wandered, no matter how much damage we have inflicted on ourselves, God still loves us and still wants what is good for us. That’s why God continues to pester us with discontent and uncertainty when we do wrong. That’s why God never lets us be fulfilled by anything other than God. That’s why God continues to offer us forgiveness.—Daniel E. Pilarczyk
Forgive us, Father, for all the things of which we are so poignantly aware, and for all those failures of will which make it so difficult for us to respond to your will. Walk with us in the long, perilous journey which stretches out before us and give to our faltering footsteps the great, strong rhythm of the purposes of God. – Howard Thurman
“NO TURNING BACK”
“The world behind me, the cross before me, no turning back, no turning back.” These words from the old gospel song “I have decided to follow Jesus,” make clear the situation of the moment. Having come to Jerusalem, there was no turning back for Jesus. The moment had come for his glorification. … The moment when Jesus would face down the ruler of this world, and as a result that ruler will be sent packing. But, how will this happen? …It is interesting that Jesus recognizes that the hour has come, but he’s not sure he’s ready. While John’s Jesus seems rather serene on the cross, taking care of his mother, asking for something to drink, and then declaring “it is finished” before giving his spirit, here his “soul is troubled.” There’s a sense here of uncertainty. Yes, even in John the humanity of Jesus is present. He recognizes that there’s no turning back. … The good news is that out of death comes life. …
I thought about the scene in the original Star Wars movie, where Obi Wan Kenobi is in a duel with Darth Vader. It is a duel of equals (and old friends), when all of a sudden, Obi Wan turns off his light saber and when Darth Vader’s light saber cuts through, apparently killing Obi Wan, Obi Wan is no longer there. He has been lifted up and transformed. He is now more than he was before. Death becomes life. I’m not sure what to make of the scene, especially since Obi Wan will guide Luke I his efforts to destroy the Death Star. Nonetheless, that particular scene does point us away from the usual path to power and success. Glorification comes in a different form than the world has suggested. …
Jesus has come into the world to participate in a cosmic battle. He has come into the world to stand up to “The System.” He has come to face down the “ruler of this world,” but he chooses to do so through the vehicle of the cross. Jesus refuses to fight the battle on the terms dictated by the Ruler of this World (kosmos). Being that this is the fiftieth anniversary of the March from Selma to Montgomery, a march in which the evils of racism and segregation were clearly exposed to the world. It was the choice of nonviolence that enabled this to occur. …
As we near the end of the Lenten journey, with the Triumphal Entry still ahead of us, may we reflect on Jesus’ vision, seeking to understand what this means for us. The Greeks came to him, and he is lifted up so as to draw all people to himself. Now is the time. The hour has come. “The World behind me, the cross before me, no turning back, no turning back.”
--Bob Cornwall, from http://www.bobcornwall.com/2015/03/the-hour-has-come-lectionary-reflection.html
“We would like to see Jesus”
In the gospel lesson for this week, some Greeks have come to the disciples asking to see Jesus. It would seem a simple request, but Jesus has something else in mind … Jesus is predicting his passion and death, telling the people gathered, “Now is the judgment of this world, now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:31-32). Indeed, this is what Jesus continues to do today, and people continue to come to see Jesus.
We come to see Jesus in bread and wine. We come to see Jesus in the faces of our sisters and brothers. We come to seek Jesus in image, in song, in words that paint a picture of our Lord. As disciples, we seek Jesus in the stranger, the poor, the marginalized, the imprisoned, and the outcast. Others who may not yet know our good news story come seeking, not even truly comprehending for what or whom they seek. Yes, we wish to see Jesus. We wish to be healed and whole and right, even when we cannot articulate in word or action this deep desire birthed in us. You, and I, and all of creation is made to be drawn into relationship with God.
When you gather for worship this week, consider the times in which we live. The church has lost its glory-day luster in many parts of Christendom. Our culture promotes a gospel of consumerism, of fragmentation and dissolution. We are held captive to our own desires and broken in so many ways. Globally we face challenges more daunting than ever before with poverty, famine, climate change, economic injustice, and warfare. And yet God is faithful. God does not abandon us. God has already written in our hearts the language of love that we so desperately need.
The challenge is to learn to speak this language, to hear it, to read it, to chew on the words and drink deeply of their meaning. God is with us always, and we are created to be God’s beloved. Even today, even in this age, God is doing a new thing. We are God’s people: forgiven, claimed, and treasured. This is the good news we have to share: life-giving and life-changing words of hope, grace, forgiveness, and love. – Sharron R. Blezard, http://www.stewardshipoflife.org/2015/03/language-of-the-heart/
THE TIME HAS COME (John 12: 20-36)
The time is here: be lifted, Human One,
to glorify the God whose rule is love;
the hour of sacrifice is why you’ve come.
Now may we hear the voice that speaks above!
The time is ripe: be planted, Faithful Seed,
to be the grain that life abundant gives.
Teach us the death-to-self that is our need —
that willingness to serve is how to live.
The time is now: shine out, O Lord of Light
into our hearts, into the shadowed earth;
show us the way to love; give us the sight
that sees in every soul eternal worth.
The time has come: be lifted, Holy One,
to draw all people to your saving grace;
as children of your light may we become
the ones who share your love through time and space.
-- Andrew King, from A Poetic Kind of Place/ Copyright ©2015 by Andrew King
I am not afraid. I was born to do this. -- Joan of Arc, right before her execution
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