HAVE IT YOUR WAY (4th Sunday of Lent)
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March 9, 2018Have you ever walked from a dark room out into the sunlight? It hurts. You end up squinting and wiping away tears from watery eyes. It takes time to adjust, and you may wish to return to the darkness where it’s a bit more comfortable. Think of the reverse scenario: when you go from the sunlight into a darker room. Again, it is hard to adjust, and this time you can hardly see. Everything is blurry and out of focus. God calls us to live in the light. The transition to the light can be painful if we are accustomed to the comfort of the dark, but we see much better and can walk in confidence when we’re in the light rather than stumbling through life unsure of where we are going in darkness. Are you open to Jesus’s invitation to live your life in the light of truth today?
FORMED Fellowship + Lunch (Every Sunday @ 12:00 noon in the Hall)
First Reading Reflection
~2 Chronicles 36:14−16, 19−23~
This reading comes from the very end of the two-volume Book of Chronicles. The passage summarizes the spiritual lesson of Israel’s history from the period of the divided kingdom and compresses it into a short description. It narrates the spiritual problems of the people during the reign of the last king of Judah, Zedekiah, who “did what was evil in the sight of the LORD” (2 Chronicles 36:12). Chronicles teaches us that the reason for the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians was not merely political, but was essentially spiritual. The people had fallen away from the Lord and had begun worshipping other gods and even introduced pagan practices into the Temple itself. Even though God sent many prophets to call the people to repentance and fi delity, they did not listen to them but rejected them. Their rejection of the Lord and his messengers brought down divine punishment, which was carried out by the Babylonian army. The Babylonians came and destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the Temple. Then they led off many of the people into exile in Babylon for many years. It was not until the Persian empire conquered the Babylonians that the captive Jews were freed and allowed to return home to rebuild the Temple.
This reading foreshadows the ministry of Jesus—the last and most important messenger God sent. He too was rejected and his message was ignored by the people of his day. Indeed, soon after Jesus’s Death and Resurrection, Jerusalem would again be attacked by a powerful foreign army and the Temple would again be destroyed. The Romans tore down the Temple brick by brick after capturing Jerusalem in the Jewish War in A.D. 70.
Second Reading Reflection
~Ephesians 2:4−10~
Saint Paul here reflects on the nature of our salvation in Christ. God has not let us remain in the spiritual death brought about by our sins, but in his great mercy and love has saved us by his Son. While elsewhere Paul talks about our resurrection as a future event, here he looks to our conversion and Baptism as a death-andresurrection experience. First, “we were dead” in sin, but now we have been “made alive again.” That is, we have already shared in Jesus’s Death on the Cross and, in his Resurrection, victory over death. In a sense, we have already been “raised from the dead.” In addition, we have been granted a share in his reign. By our faith we participate, albeit in a limited way, in Jesus’s victory and in his heavenly reign. We “sit with him in the heavenly places” (CCC 1003) and so already share in his divine life. Paul emphasizes here that our salvation comes by faith, not works—that is, we did not earn our salvation by our own doing. Rather, God did the “work” of salvation, and thus we are his “workmanship.” But that does not mean we are not responsible for continuing in good works, in fact, we were created for them (v. 10). In Paul’s teaching, we do good works because we have been saved by Christ not in order to be saved by him. Faith and good works go hand-in-hand. As St. James teaches, “faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26). Paul helps us see our salvation as a grateful reception of God’s love and mercy, a co-resurrection and co-reigning with Christ, which brings us into a participation in the divine life lived out in good works which God “prepared beforehand” for us.
Gospel Reflection
~John 3:14-21~
In this passage, the Pharisee Nicodemus has come to Jesus at nighttime to ask him questions about who he is and where he comes from. Jesus here explains that the ancient bronze serpent Moses made (cf. Numbers 21:9) served as a foreshadowing of his role as Savior. While the ancient Israelites had to look at the bronze serpent on a pole to be healed from snake-bites, Jesus will be “lifted up” on a cross. To be saved from the “snake-bite” of sin, we must look to him, raised up on the Cross. Then Jesus hands us the heart of the Gospel message—that God loved us and sent his Son that we might come to believe in him and so gain eternal life. God does not want to condemn us, but heal us and rescue us from sin. Yet, unfortunately, many of us will run from the light rather than turn toward the light. Jesus predicts that many will prefer the darkness and deliberately avoid believing in Jesus so that they do not have to change their behavior: “Their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). Our behavior and our belief go hand-in-hand, just like Paul shows in the reading from Ephesians. If we do evil deeds, we will want to hide them in the darkness, but if we do “what is true” then we will come to the Light himself and be saved by him. Those who believe look to the Lord shun the darkness and live their lives in the light.
DIGGING DEEPER:
Mercy
We hear the word “mercy” quite a bit. But what does it really mean? It comes from the Greek word misericordiae, which means literally “to nourish oneself on that which is miserable.” We are embarrassed to be seen in our weakness. We often hide our weakness from those around us and from God. But God is a God of mercy. He so desires us to offer him the areas of our lives we are weak in because it is only in our moments of weakness that we give him the opportunity and the joy of being our Savior. (I Believe in Love: A Personal Retreat Based on the Teaching of St. Thérèse of Lisieux)
PRAYER:
God is working tirelessly to bring us back to him. There is a constant pattern in our lives of us rejecting God to follow our own way, God reaching out to us to invite us back to him, and then us turning back to God, seeking his forgiveness and a new beginning. Sometimes we may feel that God gets tired of giving us a new start. “Could he really forgive me again?” we wonder. In these moments of doubt, cling to the words in today’s Gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” He loves us and wants us to know how dear we are to him so much so that he sent his own beloved Son to die on the Cross so that we might know his love, his mercy, his forgiveness, and his desire to spend eternity with us. What area of your life do you hide from the light of Christ? Where in your life are you looking to follow your own path rather than God’s plan?
RESOLUTION:
What in your life prevents you from being a pure temple? What would This week, begin to off er to God the place in your life that you seek to control. Ask him for the grace to surrender your grasp to him. Listen to what he has to say about it. Do not be afraid to “do whatever he tells you.”
Opening the Word offers prayers and insights for the Sunday Scriptural lessons. Watch the video presentation that accompanies this reflection FREE at Formed.org.
