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

Thoughts on hunger

Reflection for Third Sunday in Lent



Following our Lenten journey from last week, where Jesus is tempted to assuage his hunger by looking outside the “food” that God would provide, this week we come to a revelation of God’s way of assuaging our hunger and thirst. And it reveals God’s hunger for us. God says, “When I prove my holiness to you…I will give you a new spirit.”

This holiness is the desire to give us life to the full, and the choice to do so by offering his very self to us. Paul reminds us that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. God’s hunger for us transcends our own immediate needs as we come to recognize our “thirst” at a deeper level.

Our Gospel story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well addresses both our human hungers and thirsts, and our deeper need—for the gift of water that will become a spring welling up into eternal life. Jesus expresses his thirst and in return addresses her thirst, and ours as well.

His disciples return to wonder why He is with this woman and to offer him food. But “My food is to do the will of the One who sent me and to finish his work.”

The divine “hunger” for human salvation, as it is satisfied in Jesus’ gift of himself, leads him to tell his disciples that he has food that transcends even the need for earthly food.

As acute and overwhelming as our thirst for God might be, as exhausting and enervating as our journeys to God might seem, the yearning that God has for us and the journey that God has made into our hearts surpass it all infinitely. We continue our Lenten journey…

Len Kraus, S.J.

Thoughts on home

 

Make Your Home in Me

From: Lifesigns: Intimacy, Fecundity, and Ecstasy in Christian Perspective

When Jesus says: “Make your home in me as I make mine in you,” he offers us an intimate place that we can truly call “home.” Home is that place or space where we do not have to be afraid but can let go of our defenses and be free, free from worries, free from tensions, free from pressures. Home is where we can laugh and cry, embrace and dance, sleep long and dream quietly, eat, read, play, watch the fire, listen to music, and be with a friend. Home is where we can rest and be healed. The word “home” gathers a wide range of feelings and emotions up into one image, the image of a house where it is good to be: the house of love.

Reflection Question: If Christ were the house of love I live in, what parts of my life would finally be able to rest and be healed?

“Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”   - John 15: 4, 5

Thoughts on power

 

Matthew 20:17–28

Friends, in today’s Gospel, the mother of James and John asks Jesus on their behalf to place them in high places in his kingdom. They are asking for two of the classic four substitutes for God: wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. The two brothers specifically want the last two. Power is not, in itself, a bad thing. And the same is true of honor. Thomas Aquinas said that honor is the flag of virtue. It’s a way of signaling to others something that’s worth noticing. So then what’s the problem? The problem is that they are asking for these two things in the wrong spirit. The ego will want to use power, not for God’s purposes or in service of truth, beauty, and goodness, but for its own aggrandizement and defense. When honor is sought for its own sake or in order to puff up the ego, it becomes dangerous as well. What’s the way out? Jesus tells us: “Whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave.” When you serve others, when you become the least, you are accessing the power of God and seeking the honor of God. Bishop Robert Barron