This week’s readings are about being in exile — far from home, the place where one belongs. The first reading and the psalm teach that God can work, even through those in exile — perhaps especially through the exiled, provided that those in exile don’t lose sight of who they are and where they come from. God works through those in exile precisely because while they hopefully can live in harmony with the people native to the place they now find themselves, they stand out. They can use their visibility to be examples of authenticity and charity. Humility is necessary for authenticity, and authenticity makes room for charity, which is service toward and cooperation with others.
The third reading teaches that we can be neither authentic nor humble if we’re under the illusion that anything we are or anything we do comes from us alone. Setting aside any environmental factors that contribute to who each of us is, none of us would exist without the combined DNA of other people, and none of the people who make up who we are would exist without God’s life giving, sustaining, and restoring love. All that is exists to magnify and to be a channel for that love.
Unfortunately, the magnifying glass or prism that each of us is meant to be gets clouded by things we get tricked into thinking are God. These idols block our ability to see God’s light, to feel its warmth, through and beyond them. Blockers of God’s light that come to my mind are fear, shame, anger, and envy.
This week’s Gospel reading reassures us that Jesus didn’t come into the world to condemn us for the very human experiences that I just listed. He came into the world to bear the weight of all our sins, our weaknesses and our pain, to surrender himself entirely to these, going so far as to engage with death itself so that He could neutralize its power and along with it, the power of every other human frailty. The key to experiencing that, as evidenced by His victory over death, He’s stronger than every idol is to hand over the imposters to His custody so they don’t take custody of us. This handing over is so much harder to do than the writing about it was. The imposters still feel powerful, no matter how many times we hear that God has rescued us from them. We let ourselves get trapped by them into believing we should hide from the light because we belong to the seemingly stronger darkness, and that we’ll be set adrift and alone if we come into the light’s embrace and expose the distortions darkness creates as the illusions they are.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
It’s one thing to write about not hiding from the light and instead moving forward into its healing rays. It’s another matter to take the risk of coming out of hiding and to trust. One step toward allowing God to embrace me in my weakness and with all the I’m ashamed of is to bring what I’m tempted to hide to God in prayer. Doing this feels like coming to God and asking God to put a spotlight on me. In this situation, I may confront what I’d rather hide, even from myself. But I’ve also been known in times like this to be confused about what God wants me to bring to light. These tendencies are the reason why I need at least one other person to help me lift to God what I’d rather not acknowledge. The first three readings support my need for healing to have a relational component I can perceive with my physical senses.
And yet it’s so hard to seek this help, to put into words what fear warns me keep silent. After all, everyone else is imperfect too, and no one has the unlimited perspective of God. Will my frailty, my failings be understood if I share them? Will they be judged? Can I even put them into words? Will doing so ever bring me closer to spiritual wellness? After years of struggling in the same ways, believing I can be spiritually free and comfortable in the light is so difficult.
Nonetheless, “I do believe,” Lord, [H]elp my unbelief. (Mark 9-24). Help me not to carry burdens you are waiting to take from me. Grant me the grace to seek and to find refuge in Your light along with and in the sight of all your children. Amen.
Work cited
The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
This week’s readings give specific examples of what wisdom looks like. In general, the readings tell me that wisdom appreciates healthy boundaries and relationships. The Ten Commandments, which are listed in the first reading, help us maintain healthy boundaries and relationships. The psalm celebrates the wisdom God offers us. The third reading acknowledges that humans often don’t recognize God’s wisdom, even though the psalm praises it. The third reading points out that God’s wisdom asks us to do more than accept a set of ideas, aspire to a set of ideals, or simply beg for God to act and then wait for the action.
The Gospel shows Jesus exemplifying that having faith is more than an intellectual activity, and it isn’t a passive activity. either. This week’s fourth reading also exemplifies that living a life of faith means seeking a healthy relationship with God. And a healthy relationship with God is more than a transactional relationship. It means more than going to a specific place and/or performing. Living a life of faith requires the cooperation of the whole person — body and spirit — and the offering of everything he or she has to God.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
Vickey McBride reminds me of the importance of being sensitive to the difficulties in the lives of people I come into contact with. She reminds me to be attentive when others share their difficulties. She also acknowledges how challenging attentiveness can be in these circumstances and relates Jesus’ actions in the Gospel passage to the challenge of this part of the human experience. Click here to find out how.
Beyond this week’s readings:
It’s important that I begin this section by revisiting my response to last week’s readings. I learned from my pastor’s homily about last week’s Old Testament reading that the story of the almost-sacrifice occurs at a place in the timeline when Isaac isn’t a child. My pastor said that in the passage, Isaac is a grown man who knows what’s expected of a man in his culture. As a man in his prime, he also could overpower his much, much older father, but he doesn’t. He trusts in the promises God made to his father, so he does what the situation seems to require of him and waits to see how God will work within the situation. He chooses to trust that God is good, even if the circumstances in which he finds himself make it tempting to think otherwise. Another homily about the same reading, this homily from Fr. Mike Schmidt, goes so far as to specify that Isaac would be around the same age Jesus was when he died. (Free podcast episodes of Fr. Mike’s Sunday homilies are also available from your favorite podcast player and Ascension Media.) So there are stronger parallels between Isaac’s almost-sacrifice and Jesus’ sacrifice than I had previously realized.
Feeling called to pursue other projects has led me to focus less of my preparation for these posts on research and more of time on what the readings are saying to me and on how I feel when I read them. It turns out this approach removes some richness from reflecting on the readings because the amount of knowledge I have about the context in which a passage appears affects my response to it.
At the same time, I don’t want to make this blog another place to find commentaries from Scripture scholars. As I’ve written before, I’m not a Scripture scholar. And commentaries are insightful but accessible in many ways. You don’t need my blog to find them. In many cases, you can find them in the introductions to Bible books and in the footnotes within those books, to name just a couple study aids. Rather than seeing this blog a place to find those introductions and footnotes, I’ve always envisioned it primarily as a spiritual journal. Nevertheless, I’d like to do a better job from here on out of putting the readings into their cultural and chronological context as I pray about them by writing here.
With this intention in mind, I’ll start with my gut reactions and my experience with the Gospel passage, and once I’ve laid these out, I’ll bring in some context from someone with a lot more expertise on the topic than I have. I guess my main experience with and response to this passage is to have questions:
How often would Jesus have cause to act similarly as He does in the passage if He walked into churches today?
If someone were to walk into a place of worship today and behave similarly to how Jesus does in the passage, would we be willing to consider that the person whom many would call a vandal has a point? It’s easy when we recognize the instigator as Jesus to look for righteousness behind the actions. Could we do the same if we weren’t told the instigator was Jesus?
How comfortable are we, really, with the reality that Christianity is about worshiping by imitating a person? Believing that God has a body also means that our bodies and spirits are places of worship. We are the church. If the Spirit of God — love — isn’t obviously at work in our actions, the places we worship might be little more than marketplaces — or perhaps worse — they might be just buildings, idols to human achievement or aspirations, vessels that might hold a healing balm but don’t.
How well do we think we know God and God’s will? How will we respond if what we think we know or what we’re used to gets challenged?
Like the writer of this post, I’ve heard this week’s Gospel passage explained in terms of the money changers taking advantage of poor worshipers for profit. But according to the perspective on the passage offered by the blog, the money changers may not have been behaving unethically. Jesus’ actions may be less about who the money changers are and more about who He is and who we can become through relationship with Him.
Lord, help me recognize Your presence in my life, even when You’re present in ways I don’t expect You to be and don’t seem present in ways I do expect. Help me magnify Your presence. Help me also to recognize Your presence in those around me, especially when others don’t do what I expect or what I think is best. Amen.
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.
This is the first week of a two-week break from the blog. During the break, I’m turning the focus of this space to reflections on the Sunday readings from two of my spiritual sisters.
This week’s look at experiences of being called comes from Marissa Papula.
Becoming the person I’m meant to be means continually re-examining who and what I need to let go of and who and what I need to take hold of. It’s a continuous journey of discerning what to do when and when to let go of doing so I don’t get in the way of the Holy Spirit’s movement. The psalm says that God calls me to these cycles of surrender and action.
The third reading reminds me that I’m made for relationship — with nature, with others, and with God. It reminds me that to be in relationship means to give and to receive with commitment. A relationship isn’t fleeting, and it takes effort and maintenance. It takes openness.
God demonstrated that I’m made for relationship by living a human life. The relationship between the created and the creator is perfect in Jesus, and the Spirit that joins me to Jesus when I’m open to him can patch the imperfections in my relationship with God.
Because Jesus has a human body and consciousness, the body is just as much a part of God as the spirit. So treating my body and the bodies of others as if I believe this is true is vital. Doing so nurtures relationships between people and God. Treating bodies as and spirits if they are meant for eternal relationship — relationship between body and spirit, between one body and spirit and another, and between those sacred persons made of body and spirit and God — makes them open to eternal relationship.
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been purchased at a price. Therefore glorify God in your body,” the third reading says (1 Cor. 6:19-20). I don’t know about you, but thinking of myself as a possession bought by God makes my stomach churn. I’m not comfortable with the idea of a parent buying his or her children. But I guess if a child sold him or herself on the promise of receiving a reward that didn’t pan out, and the only way to get the child back was for the parent to buy him or her, I feel a little better about the analogy.
Nonetheless, I find the analogy of being part of God’s body more helpful. A head and an arm have different functions, but, of course, both are part of the whole that is the body. It makes sense to try to reattach an arm that has become separated from that body. To use another analogy that doesn’t come from Scripture (and, granted, doesn’t quite square with what I understand of Christian theology, but I’m going to use it anyway) the cards in a deck or the pieces in another type of game don’t own each other, they don’t control each other, but they belong to each other. If one piece of the set or one card from the deck is missing, the set or deck is incomplete and the game can’t be played as intended. Unlike a deck of cards or a chess set of which I might be a part, God doesn’t need me to be complete, yet God has a vision in mind, and that vision includes a place and a purpose for each of us.
The Gospel passage reinforces that God calls us to relationship, a place, and a purpose in the Divine plan. In this passage, Jesus doesn’t call his disciples in an obvious way. Rather, he walks by, and John announces who he is (John 1:36). Two disciples respond to the announcement by following Jesus and by asking where he’s staying (John 1:37-38). They aren’t seeking knowledge alone from Jesus. They want relationship with him, to know him, and to be known by him, to go where he goes, do what he does, and stay where he stays. They want to be a part of his group, his set, you might say.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
Laura Boysen-Aragon reflects on the (anxiety inducing for me) challenges and the opportunities of recognizing and responding to God’s voice reminding us with whom we belong.
Beyond this week’s readings:
Lord, help me to practice listening, to persevere in the practice, and help me also to know what work is — and isn’t – mind to do. Amen.
Works cited
The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
Though that trust is powerful, its power doesn’t come without pain.
This trust involves practicing lifelong patience and perseverance.
When the practices of trust, patience, and perseverance are not given up on, when they are instead authentically lived, they reach from generation to generation.
Mary, Joseph, and Jesus had faith that all of the above statements were true. They also had proof of these truths in their own lives too, but they didn’t know at the time of the events in this week’s Gospel just how much pain they’d bear because of their trust in God’s promises or what forms that pain would take.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
On this day that honors the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Lisa Fullam, D.V.M., Th.D. reflects on the spiritual meaning of family. Spoiler alert: this meaning may be found among people who don’t share genes.
Beyond this week’s readings:
There are more choices for today’s readings than there are on many days. Dr. Fullam responds to different passages than the ones I read. I invite you refer to those passages as well as to the ones I listed at the top of this post. Dr. Fullam addresses what I often struggle with in the alternate passages and in the messages I often receive on this day each year. You can find the chapter and verse numbers for the alternate readings here.
Lord, thank You for giving us Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as models of trust in God. Thank You also for inspiring Professor Emerita Lisa Fullam to encourage us, who are neither Jesus, nor Mary, nor Joseph, and yet, are still members of families. Amen.
Sitting with the Sacred 