Thoughts on healing

You may have heard the famous drinking toast, “Here’s mud in your eye,” a wish, perhaps, for good health or prosperity. This Sunday’s Gospel does relate to mud in a person’s eye: the blind man whom Jesus heals and restores. Jesus touches his eyes with a part of himself—his saliva—and earth, part of God’s good creation. Jesus goes directly to the blind man, doesn’t wait for him to ask for healing. (The truth of our lives is that it is Jesus who comes to us, even before we come to Him.)

After the man has washed in the pool called Siloam (“Sent,”) although there follows a debate and argument about who has the authority to heal,( to do a work on the Sabbath), this is a story about light and darkness, about the enlightenment and grace to see clearly who it is that brings us light and life. Jesus says,” As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” It is a story about the work of God in our lives: “This man was healed so that God’s works might be revealed” …. the darkness was not able to overcome the light.”

For us, Lent can be a time to open our eyes to the love and care that Jesus has for us, to acknowledge and follow him as our inseparable friend and center of our lives.

“Through his paschal mystery he accomplished the deed that has freed us from the yoke of sin and death, summoning us to proclaim everywhere his mighty works. We have been called out of darkness into his wonderful light.” …So, here’s mud in your eye!

Len Kraus, S.J.

Thoughts on demons

 

Third Week of Lent

Luke 11:14–23

Friends, in today’s Gospel, we learn of a person possessed by a demon. Jesus meets the man and drives out the demon, but then is immediately accused of being in league with Satan. Some of the witnesses said, “By the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons, he drives out demons.” Jesus’s response is wonderful in its logic and laconicism: “Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste and house will fall against house. And if Satan is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?” The demonic power is always one of scattering. It breaks up communion. But Jesus, as always, is the voice of communio, of one bringing things back together. Think back to Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand. Facing a large, hungry crowd, his disciples beg him to “dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves.” But Jesus answers, “There is no need for them to go away; give them some food yourselves.” Whatever drives the Church apart is an echo of this “dismiss the crowds” impulse and a reminder of the demonic tendency to divide. In times of trial and threat, this is a very common instinct. We blame, attack, break up, and disperse. But Jesus is right: “There is no need for them to go away.”  Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on silence

 

Entering Your Silence

From: Following Jesus: Finding Our Way Home in an Age of Anxiety

Lord Jesus, Help me in this moment to set aside all that has preoccupied me today. Take away the many fears that rage around me. Take away the many feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem, and let me be shaped by you, the Lamb of God. Help me to enter more deeply into your silence, where I can listen to you and hear how you call me, and find the strength and courage to follow you. I ask you to be with me as I listen to your word and come to a deeper understanding of your mystery of calling me to follow you. Be with me now and always. Amen.

Reflection Question: As I remain in prayer, what word, image, or invitation am I being asked to hold gently today?

“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness and who seek the Lord: Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn…”   - Isaiah 51: 1

Thoughts on mercy

 

Third Week of Lent

Matthew 18:21–35

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable that illustrates God’s mercy. The Latin word for mercy is misericordia, which designates the suffering of the heart, or compassion—cum patior (“I suffer with”).  Mercy is identical to what the Old Testament authors refer to as God’s hesed, or tender mercy. It is the characteristic of God, for God is love. The love that obtains among the Trinitarian persons spills over into God’s love for the world that he has made.  Think of a mother’s love for her children. Could you ever imagine a mother becoming indifferent to one of her offspring? But even should she forget, we read in the prophet Isaiah, God will never forget his own. Consider the fact that nothing would exist were it not willed into being by God. But God has no need of anything; hence, his sustaining of the universe is an act of disinterested love and tender mercy.  There is no greater manifestation of the divine mercy than the forgiveness of sins. When G. K. Chesterton was asked why he became a Catholic, he answered, “To have my sins forgiven.” This is the greatest grace the Church can offer: reconciliation, the restoration of the divine friendship, the forgiveness of our sins.  Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on baptism

 

Third Week of Lent

Luke 4:24–30

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus’s hometown rejects him as a prophet. And I want to say a word about your role as a prophet. When most laypeople hear about prophecy, they sit back and their eyes glaze over. “That’s something for the priests and the bishops to worry about; they’re the modern-day prophets. I don’t have that call or that responsibility.” Well, think again! Vatican II emphasized the universal call to holiness, rooted in the dynamics of baptism. Every baptized person is conformed unto Christ—priest, prophet, and king. Whenever you assist at Mass, you are exercising your priestly office, participating in the worship of God. Whenever you direct your kids to discover their mission in the Church, or provide guidance to someone in the spiritual life, you are exercising your kingly office. As a baptized individual, you are commissioned as a prophet—which is to say, a speaker of God’s truth. And the prophetic word is not your own. It is not the result of your own meditations on the spiritual life, as valuable and correct as those may be. The prophetic word is the word of God given to you by God. Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on thirst

 

Third Sunday of Lent

John 4:5–42

Friends, today we read the magnificent story from John’s Gospel about the woman at the well. The image of thirst is used throughout the Bible to speak of the human longing for God. At the height of the heat of the day, Jesus asks a Samaritan woman for a drink of water. We are on very holy ground, for the whole of salvation is summed up here: Our thirst for God meets God’s even more dramatic thirst for us. Augustine picked up on this in his commentary on the passage: “Jesus was thirsty for the woman’s faith.” At first, of course, the woman is put off. How could this Jewish man be asking me for a drink? Translate this into spiritual language: How could almighty God be thirsty for my faith and my attention? Jesus’s answer is magnificent: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst.” We are built for union with God, and therefore we thirst for God with an infinite desire. What Jesus offers her is the life of grace, the divine life, God’s own self. That’s the only energy that can ever satisfy our infinite longing. Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on the Prodigal Son

 

Second Week of Lent

Luke 15:1–3, 11–32

Friends, at the core of today’s Gospel is a portrait of our God, who is prodigal. The father stands for the God whose very nature is to give, the God who simply is love. And the younger son stands for all of us sinners who tend to misunderstand how to access the divine love.  Since God exists only in gift form, his life, even in principle, cannot become a possession. Instead, it is “had” only on the fly, only in the measure that it is given away. When we cling to it, it disappears, according to a kind of spiritual physics. The Greek that lies behind “distant country” in the parable is chora makra; that means, literally, “the great emptiness.” Trying to turn the divine gift into the ego’s possession necessarily results in nothing, nonbeing, the void.  St. John Paul II formulated the principle here as “the law of the gift”—that your being increases inasmuch as you give it away. If clinging and possessing are the marks of the chora makra, then the law of the gift is the defining dynamic of the father’s house, where the robe and the ring and the fatted calf are on permanent offer. Bishop Robert Barron