Author: DVO

This verse, which the liturgy of the Church uses as a call to penance on Ash Wednesday, acts as a conclusion to the first part of the Joel through a change of heart, backed up by sincere acts of penance, which can cause God to stay his hand and spare his people any more affliction. Saint Jerome calls us to show our repentance and inner conversion through fasting, mourning, and tears. “By fasting now, your hunger will be satisfied later; mourning now, one day you will laugh; weeping now, you shall be consoled.” Catherine de Hueck Doherty, in her book, Season of Mercy: Lent and Easter, writes: “Let each one of us open their heart to God, and let him wash us clean, let him fill us with a hunger for him, and a thirst. Let him make us his own so that our joy will be beyond reckoning when we come to Easter. All we have to do is pass from the old into the new. Leave behind the things that bind us away from God. Cut the cords with the scissors of love and go forth.”

It’s 4 AM, and the reading for the day that has captured me is from Sirach. I couldn’t have asked for a better verse to reflect upon about trusting God. I am blessed to work in the Lord’s vineyard, yet sometimes it can challenge your trust in others and the organizational institutions of faith. Minor concerns can morph into many things affecting trust in people and the institutions we serve. Most concerning is the danger of allowing the darkness of life to creep in and affect trust in the Lord. Serving the Lord is not without its trials. But no matter what happens, if we genuinely believe in all that the Lord stands for, we will remain sincere, steadfast, and faithful. Ben Sira believed that patience and unwavering trust in God are ultimately rewarded with God’s mercy and lasting joy. Trust has to be complete. You either trust someone, or you don’t. You can’t “kind of” trust somebody or trust them “a little bit.” If you say you trust someone, you trust them with your life. So when it comes to trusting in God, it means you trust the Lord in everything, without a doubt, without question, and with boundless confidence. It’s easier said than done, but that is what genuine trust is all about.

Prayer is an often-beguiling part of our faith. Many fail to pray because of unbelief in its effectiveness. While it is normal to feel this way, Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we need to reflect on this critical reminder: prayer is most important and powerful precisely when we feel it is most hopeless and most helpless. From the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus highlighted the need for humility. Today’s reading from Mark describes another exorcising of evil spirits by Jesus. His disciples are again amazed at what he can do, especially since they could not drive out the spirit in their earlier attempts. The Lord uses this event as another opportunity to teach the disciples the need for humility. He tells them these kinds of efforts will never be under their control. All their future ministry efforts in healing and deliverance will bear fruit only through reliance on God, as they bring all needs to the feet of the Lord in prayer. We need to pray precisely because we are helpless and precisely because it does seem hopeless.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls us to the perfection of the Father. But in our humanness, we are incapable of that type of perfection, of having no flaws. Is that the perfection the Lord calling us to? Hebrew culture taught perfection as compassion. If we take into account the Hebrew understanding, we move from the idea of having no flaws to a perfection defined by the compassion we show others. Who are the “others” in life? Fr. Ron Rolheiser provides some insight when he says there will be just one question asked at the pearly gates, “Where are the others? You know, the widows, orphans, and strangers. I mean, you did you feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoners, right? This must be the compassion we live out. It requires a lens of life that is focused outwardly. Bishop Robert Barron says it is evidenced by “willing the good of the other, for the other.” It’s moving away from any self-reference and only giving away the love of God precisely and only for the good of the other – no strings attached. That is the perfection we should strive to attain each day. And that, I would propose, is living in a world that could be defined as “heaven on earth.”

The Gospel verse today comes from Mark’s recounting of the Transfiguration of Christ. Mark describes the Transfiguration as a literal metamorphosis, a “going beyond the form that he had.” Bishop Robert Barron uses Paul’s language to speak of the Transfiguration as “the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of Jesus Christ.” In and through his humble humanity, his divinity shines forth. The proximity of his divinity in no way compromises the integrity of his humanity but instead makes it shine in greater beauty. This is the New Testament version of the burning bush. The Jesus who is both divine and human is the Jesus who is evangelically compelling. If Jesus is only divine, he doesn’t touch us; if he is only human, he can’t save us. Jesus’ splendor consists of the coming together of his two natures.

How do we live out the reflection verse from Mark’s Gospel message? To be a disciple of Jesus means to stand up and be counted. What if all of our accumulated possessions were sent away, but we were left behind? Would we lose our grounding? Our identity? Our meaning and purpose? Jesus asks us to examine our attachments. He reminds us that the real objective of this life is to possess eternal life through his salvific grace and our acceptance of that gift. We live out that gift by embracing his great commandment: Love of God and neighbor. When we keep our eyes fixed on our relationship with God, we find the strength and the mercy that helps us get through any daily cross that needs to be carried. It begins by centering life on the center of life, Christ.

What are you saying to the world about who Jesus is in your life by your daily behavior? Unlike the other disciples, Peter seems to know who Jesus is because he has spent the most time with him. There is a truth in this understanding that we can apply to our relationship with the Lord. The more time we spend developing an understanding and using Jesus’ teachings in our life, the more we begin to light the fire of desire to know him more intimately and see him as Peter did. But we must also recognize that we can be susceptible to human ways of thinking, much like Peter did. After acknowledging Jesus as Christ, we read that Peter falls into an all too familiar pattern of human thinking when he misreads the mission of Jesus. Only when we learn to empty ourselves of our will and our ways of thinking can we begin to know and understand what it means to do God’s will. That is how we learn to walk the path of holiness, the path of compassion, and become the light and love of Christ to the world.

The Old Testament described God as “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.” Paul now modifies this definition by saying, “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He is the personal God, recognized through his relationship with Jesus, his Son, the Christ, the mediator of the New Covenant. With a more profound knowledge of God, Paul prays that Christians might obtain a fuller and livelier hope because God and hope are inseparable. St. Pius X expands on this, “Hope is a supernatural virtue, infused by God into our soul, by which we desire and expect eternal life, promised by God to his servants, and the means necessary to obtain it.” This same power is at work in every Christian through God’s gift of hope. Hope’s foundation is God’s love and power, manifested in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Through all things and in all things, God is always with us.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” This is an impossibility for human beings if we understand perfection, in this Greek sense, meaning “without flaws.” But in Hebrew, perfection means compassion. Luke’s Gospel reflects this by saying, “Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate.” Jesus says, “If you love me, you’ll keep my word; if you don’t keep my word, don’t pretend that you are loving me.” There isn’t a single thing you can do to make God love you more, and there isn’t a single thing you can do to make God love you less. There will be only one set of questions asked in getting to heaven: “Did you feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners?”

One of the first stories of humanity in scripture is one of resentfulness and depression. Cain was envious of Abel and felt slighted by God. Envy is one of the classic seven deadly sins. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that envy shows itself as bitterness, hypercriticalness, and incapacity to praise someone else or feel the same empathy for the fortunate as for the unfortunate. This can be a substantial spiritual challenge, for in heaven, scripture tells us that we will “offer unending praise” to God. For many, then, one of the significant spiritual tasks is to come to grips with the bitterness that comes from envy to move from criticism to praise, from anger to mellowness, and from the desire to possess to the desire to admire. Fr. Rolheiser notes the most important thing is learning how to forgive ourselves, our parents, our culture, our church, our teachers, our mentors, those who have wounded us, life itself, and God for the state of things and the state of our lives. To fail at this is to die in bitterness, having never known the true happiness God had always desired for us.