The message I first get from the first reading is that the one who withholds nothing from God receives blessings now and into eternity.
The message of the psalm is a challenge to trust God, especially when doing so is most difficult. Actually, the first and third readings issue this challenge as well. The third reading also asserts that God blesses and saves whomever trusts God. And the Transfiguration in the Gospel promises the same. It also reminds us who Jesus is, and who we are. When we listen to Jesus and show that we’ve been paying attention by following Him, we regain a clear perspective of who we are, the perspective that Jesus shared about himself and about us. When we live this perspective, acting as beloved sons and daughters of God, we’re family members connected by more than DNA or choice, and someday, neither time nor any other force will be able to limit the reach of our light or our love. This is a promise that runs through each of this week’s readings.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
I’m grateful to have access to Ms. Ibrahim’s perspective on the first reading, because I find the Old Testament passage disturbing. If someone today said God commanded the literal sacrifice of his or her child, even if the person later said God had stopped the sacrifice, people inside and outside religious communities would express certainty that God had not commanded the sacrifice. They’d say the parent was mentally ill and/or hearing the voice of Satan or a demon.
As with the actions attributed to God in last week’s Old Testament reading, it can be very tempting to smooth over the disturbing content and implications of the passage by saying that the Old Testament reading prefigures God the Father not withholding the sacrifice of his Son on the cross to save the rest of humanity.
But I can think of some differences between the two sacrifices. First, thankfully, in the first reading, God prevents the sacrifice, Second, Jesus is an adult who accepted the cross, not a child, as Isaac is in this week’s Old Testament passage. I see other differences as well, but I think I’ll save these observations for a future Palm Sunday reflection.
Both the crucifixion and the story of Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac inspire me to pray about violence. Especially on my mind is how these parts of Scripture present violence done in the name of God. I offer the following prayer:
Lord, grant us the grace to trust You to keep Your promises and the freedom to live in friendship with You. Help us to recognize the vulnerable among us. Guide us and to care for them and protect them. Guide us in discernment as we seek to do Your will. Deliver us from temptation and evil masquerading as Your will. Protect us from violence, especially violence that claims to be done in Your name, but only harms the people and other living things and resources that are most vulnerable in this world rather than protecting them. Amen.
This week’s readings remind me that neither suffering nor pleasure is eternal in the universe. Only God is eternal and all-powerful. Sin is rejecting that which gives life and treating something else as if it were eternal and all-powerful. The readings invite me to re-examine what the things I think, do, and say reveal about what I treat like God. The passages encourage me to step back from my routines, to start fresh, and to rearrange my priorities so that I treat only God as eternal, all-wise, and all-powerful. They propose that committing to a period of abstaining from something that, while not harmful, is also not necessary, can help me reorder my life and clarify and broaden my perspective. In other words, the readings propose spiritual decluttering for the sake of gaining that broader perspective and increased clarity.
This week’s readings also remind me that actions have consequences, but I don’t believe this reality means that God sends the consequences. Certain choices yield unpleasant results, but God can take those results and use them for good. I can also use my choices to practice self-control and to help avoid experiences that are more unpleasant than the temporary inconveniences that practicing self-control can entail.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
Diana Marin offers her perspective on what a spiritual desert feels like, means, and can provide.
Beyond this week’s readings:
The first reading communicates that a rainbow is a reminder of God’s promise never again to destroy the earth and almost everyone who lives on it with a flood. The psalm says that God is good, “shows sinners the way,” and “guides the humble to justice” (Psalm 25: 8-9). I have a hard time reconciling what the psalm says about God with the story about a massive flood that kills all but two of each species and one human family. My experience of the world around me and with what I’ve been taught tells me that people are made up of varying combinations of positive and negative traits. No one I’ve known has possessed either all positive traits or all negative ones. I’ve also been taught that everyone around me is created by God and loved by God, while also being vulnerable to temptation and sin. So wouldn’t Noah and his family have these characteristics too? I can imagine some arguing in response to this question that maybe Noah’s family asked for God’s forgiveness and others didn’t. Nobody outside of Noah’s family? Really?
I’m not actually bothered by these questions because I don’t view the first reading as a historical account. I think there was a massive flood because several cultures have passed down stories about it, but I also think it’s important not to be too literal about what the flood says about human nature and Divine nature.
The third reading offers a lens through which Christians can look at the flood and the rainbow that Genesis says followed it. I read the epistle as proposing that between His death and resurrection, Christ redeemed the victims of the flood, a comforting understanding to have after the resurrection and ages after that flood. Because of Christ’s total surrender to death and His victory over it, physical death is not final. Yet it’s important not to minimize that death is often painful for anyone touched by it in any way. Therefore, it’s important not to minimize the tragic nature of a massive flood, even as we look at such an event through the lens of Scripture passages written later, when understandings of God and how God interacts with the material world had evolved.
The third reading proposes that the flood prefigures baptism. It’s jarring to think of baptism as a flood that kills unjust people and establishes a new relationship, renewing promises to the people who come after the flood. The Good News is that the death of baptism isn’t a physical one. Neither is the other death, the death of selfish-centeredness I’m called to surrender to each day to keep my priorities from getting out of whack, to keep me from letting someone or something not God masquerade as God in my life.
Lord, every time I see a rainbow, remind me that my baptism was a death that inaugurated a new life, one stronger than weakness and physical death. Grant me the grace to keep returning to You, the Source of that life, to reignite the fire of Your eternal life within me. Amen.
Work cited
Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc. “1st Sunday of Lent, Sunday 18 February 2024: Readings at Mass.” The New American Bible, 2001. Universalis for Windows, Version 2.185, Universalis Publishing Ltd., 29 Jan. 2024, https://universalis.com/n-app-windows.htm.
In the first passage, I read that the Lord gives specific instructions to Moses and Aaron about what to do if someone has leprosy and what to tell the affected person to do.
The subject of the psalm is a different disease — the disease of sinfulness. The Good News that this psalm shares is that God offers treatment for the latter condition to everyone. The first step in the treatment is acknowledging I have this illness. The second is sharing with God and with a wise adviser or two the symptoms of it that I’m experiencing. The third step is acknowledging that I can get rid of neither the symptoms nor their cause of this illness on my own. The process of spiritual healing begins with my trust in the power of God to cure what’s sick in my soul and my awareness of and gratitude for what in me reflects God.
The third passage, the epistle, begins by reminding me that my purpose is to reflect God. The ideal is for people to be drawn to God by being able to appreciate how others and whatever is beautiful around them reflect God. I’m called to discern what guardrails come from love of God and others and what might seem like a guardrail but isn’t. It’s a wall, a human construct that divides family members and distorts their relationships with the world around them. In this passage, Paul is able to envision a world in which members of the human family, with God’s accompaniment, can come from different places and with different experiences without being divided. He urges us to honor each other’s feelings and to respect the diversity of our human family.
The Gospel passage, I see Jesus curing a disease that has separated a man from the wider community of people affected by that illness. I also see him honoring the feelings and the gifts of that person, as well as the practices of the culture both men were born into. I read that Jesus was “moved with pity” and that “he stretched out his hand [and] touched [the man] (Mark 1:41). Jesus feels empathy for the challenges the man faces.
I also notice that when the man approaches Jesus, he doesn’t actually make a request. Instead, he makes a proclamation of faith in what Jesus can do for him. In this scene, Jesus doesn’t say after the healing that faith has saved the man, but another healing scenes, he does tell the beneficiary this. I think showing the ill man making a statement rather than a request and then showing Jesus healing is another way of recognizing the man’s faith. (Skip ahead to Beyond This Week’s Readings for an important aside about this aspect of the story. Finished the PSA break? Okay. Let’s rejoin our regularly scheduled programming that’s already in progress.)
The passage could have just said that Jesus touched the man, and the man was healed. But it doesn’t say this. It stands out to me that the passage says Jesus “stretched out his hand” (Mark 1:41). Because of my muscle spasticity, I can’t fully extend my arm, so to me, the passage is making a point that Jesus’s work takes effort and that that work is closing an often wide divide between people with this condition and people without it. Now quarantining people with this condition had a practical benefit for the wider community. What’s today called Hansen’s disease is contagious, though not as contagious as it was once thought, according to Wikipedia’s Leprosy entry. The infection can affect the nerves and the lungs and can lead to amputations as well as affecting the skin.
Jesus demonstrates knowing that communities lose irreplaceable contributions when some members are cut off from them. He also demonstrates understanding that humans are made for community, and not just conversation either, but companionship that includes touch.
Jesus’ actions after the healing also reveal wisdom, as we might expect. They remind us, for one, of the importance of letting timing shape our actions. His actions suggest he has discerned that working within the expectations of authority figures who will be challenged by his message, not giving offense, in other words, is important to fulfilling his mission at the time of this healing. He tells the newly cured man not to discuss with anyone the change in his condition or how it came about. He tells the man that instead of talking about his healing, he should go to the priest, who will see that he no longer displays the visible symptoms of the illness. Once the priest declares him clean, Jesus instructs, he should make offerings to God in gratitude for his cleansing (Mark 1:44).
I think Jesus knows the man won’t follow his instructions. Aside from Him being both fully human and fully divine at and it not being clear to us in this life how those two natures interacted, I can’t imagine the healed man being able to resist telling everyone he meets what he’s just experienced. People will no longer distance themselves at the sight of him. They’ll no longer turn away if they spot him in the distance. His appearance won’t make children scream or cry. And these are just the unpleasant reactions I imagined him receiving on account of the outward signs of his former condition. Illnesses and disabilities shape lives in so many ways that aren’t visible. I suspect Jesus not only understands that healing the man will have these effects on his life, but also he understands how tempting it is to share even a secret that is far less significant than the one the healed man knows.
Regardless of how prepared He was for the man not to follow his instructions, the reading shows Him seeking to do what He’s called to do in a way that acknowledges and responds to how the choices of others affect that calling. He responds to the news of his miracles spreading by staying in more sparsely populated areas (Mark 1:45).
We saw in last week’s Gospel that He uses time away from crowds to rest and to speak and listen to his Father. Maybe it was during one of these times away that the man who gets healed in this reading was able to approach Jesus. This week, we read that despite His efforts to give Himself that time and space, people who need help and trust that He can provide it find him anyway. God works in all our circumstances, regardless of whether our senses can detect that this is true or whether we feel like it’s true. My senses often can’t, and I often wish I felt the Spirit’s unending accompaniment more strongly.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
Olivia Cathrine Hastie reflects on what it means for God to make us clean. It means far more than removing visible or invisible dirt from us, even “dirt” as in anything that might be perceived as unpleasant or uncomfortable, either by us or by someone forming an impression about us based on what he or she can perceive. She also points out that there are different words used in different translations of how Jesus is described as feeling in the Gospel passage. As I wrote earlier, the translation used for Masses in the U.S. says he feels pity for the sick man. Ms. Hastie says other translations use the word “compassion” in the place of “pity. “
Beyond this week’s readings:
I propose that compassion makes more sense than pity in the context of the Gospel passage. I make this proposal because I’d also like to offer that pity says the person who has it only feels sorry for the person who inspires that feeling, whereas a person acts with compassion. Compassion addresses a need, whereas pity merely recognizes one. Okay, maybe sometimes pity donates a few coins or offers another temporary fix in response to a situation, but I’d like to think that compassion allows for deeper connections that extend in more directions, and it offers both material and emotional or spiritual help.
In addition to prompting me to make a distinction between pity and compassion, the Gospel passage prompts me to feel it’s important to say a bit about the relationship between faith and healing. Some believe that if a person has enough faith, he or she will be healed of whatever ails him or her physically and/or mentally. As a person who is neurodiverse and has a physical disability, this perspective is unhelpful and even hurtful. It implies, however unintentionally so, that if I had enough faith, my mind and body would work the way medical textbooks say healthy minds and bodies should.
Elsewhere, Jesus tells his disciples that a man isn’t blind because of his or his parents’ sins (John 9:3). And Jesus provides the ultimate example of faith, yet he still suffered crucifixion and died from it before rising the following Sunday.
The miracles in the Gospels teach readers and hearers about who Jesus is. He is God. That is to say that he has authority over nature and the authority to forgive sins and liberate people from the grip of them. He is sensitive to the requests and the unacknowledged needs of people who approach him. But we were reminded last week that he didn’t stay in one town and continue to work miracles there. The inclusion of this detail suggests that not everyone who might have sought healing from Jesus in a given town was healed.
I have faith that there’s not a single form of suffering in the world that He doesn’t care about, yet despite this care that I have faith in, suffering still continues, and sometimes it’s not the result of anyone’s actions. I struggle with the idea that He wills suffering. Yet my senses compel me to accept that he allows it. Why? I won’t pretend to know all the reasons.
Lord, help me to recognize what suffering I can prevent and what suffering I can alleviate. Help me to be patient with the suffering You allow that I cannot prevent or alleviate — at least not right now. Help me to recognize if my ability to help changes. Help us to experience Your presence with us in our suffering. Amen.
Work cited
The Bible.The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
The first reading reminds me I’m not alone when life feels like a burden and everything life involves feels like nothing more than an ending and unwelcome obligation. It reminds me it’s okay to share these feelings with God in an unfiltered way. It also encourages me to consider the ways the situations I find myself in might be different than the trials Job finds himself in the midst of. It reminds me to look for blessings, however insignificant they sometimes seem.
This week’s psalm is one of praise. It characterizes God as a healer of all kinds of wounds, a healer whose wisdom has no limits.
The third reading returns to the subject of obligations, specifically the obligation to preach the gospel. When I read the parts of 1 Corinthians that come before and after this reading, I’m reminded that preaching the gospel is about so much more than talk. It’s about living like Jesus so that his message will come alive for others through me. Living like Jesus means giving of myself to others, acknowledging my feelings and desires and what I’m experiencing in a given moment, without forgetting that these realities are for from permanent.
Therefore, I have the obligation to preach the gospel with my life regardless of how I feel about having that mission. If I’m eager to fulfill that mission, the fulfilling of it is its own reward. If I’m not eager, then I’ve been asked to share the gifts that God has given to me anyway. I’m also challenged when I share these gifts not to expect to receive anything from the person with whom I’m sharing. The promise of the reading, perhaps, is that the reward whenever I offer nothing beyond my obedience will be grace received from giving without expectations. Such giving promises the grace of spiritual freedom. It seems to me that this freedom paradoxically offers the ability to reach out to people from many different walks of life because a spiritually free person isn’t preoccupied with the concerns of only one individual or group. A person can get a more expansive perspective from this situation because she hasn’t zoomed in on the picture too closely.
In the fourth reading, I see Jesus living what this paradox of spiritual freedom looks like. Peter’s mother-in-law is ill, and Peter brings this situation to Jesus, who cares for His friend by making the mother-in-law well. Yet Jesus doesn’t just help His closest companions or the people in one town. We read about Him moving on to the next town. But before He does so, He makes time for rest, quiet, prayer, and reflection, showing that these activities are essential to fulfilling His mission, which is a mission you and I have been asked to share with others and with Him.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
Mary Anne Sladich-Lantz’s reflection on this week’s reading calls attention to what Jesus does when He heals Peter’s mother-in-law. I find it inspiring that she zeros in on the very human detail that she does. Read here to find out what I mean. Her reflection also includes a quotation I’ll turn into a pull quote that makes a good summary of this week’s readings, as well as a words to bring to prayer.
Discovering wholeness, healing, and joy do not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we are healed and discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.
From The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, as quoted by Mary Anne Sladich-Lantz
Beyond this week’s readings:
I’m not writing this post as a person who practices what this week’s readings preach. My natural inclination right now and at almost all other times, it seems, is to crawl in a hole in the ground with a device whose battery somehow never dies and lose myself in games, music, and movies. Forever. Because silence and reality feel too heavy to bear.
Now movies, games, aren’t necessarily bad things. In fact, I believe they can be part of rest. It’s the desire to turn only to these things that’s problematic, to say the least. My experience is that these activities don’t provide rest that’s truly restorative. Maybe an activity’s ability to restore makes the difference between its ability to provide escape and its ability to provide rest. The things that are easy for me to turn to offer escape, while prayer and reflection provide rest.
Can listening to music to be a form of prayer? Absolutely. But my experience is that even music or a movie with a spiritual message sometimes offers the illusion of a preferable change in feelings or perspective, an illusion that fades once the music or the picture fades.
I guess this experience is a reminder that so much of life is fleeting, and that the only constants are God and change and that God is the source of true rest. And yet God isn’t calling me to rest all the time — even in God. The time for eternal rest comes after this life. While I still have this life, God calls me to a varying rhythm of work and rest.
Lord, help me to resist the constant desire to withdraw and to stay withdrawn. Help me to reach out to others rather than lash out at them. Amen.
Work Consulted but Not Linked to
The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
Sitting with the Sacred 