Matthew Williams – Page 14 – Meditation on Daily Mass Readings

February 17, 2021February 2, 2021

Even Now

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

Lent strikes us as a dreary time, and with good reason. We make sacrifices, spend more time in prayer, and give more alms to the poor–none of this is fun.

So, we would expect today’s readings to tell us essentially to buck up, to brace ourselves, to jump into the cold water of sacrifice and purification.

The first reading, however, which is all about fasting and repenting, is full of joy. It would appear, even, that the weeping mentioned is not driven by sorrow, but rather the people are weeping out of relief and hope.

“Even now, says the LORD, return to me with your whole heart,” is how the first reading begins. Even now. The people have been procrastinating that return. The context of the reading suggests that they are thinking they may be too late to repent. But the prophet assures them that it is not too late. Even now, if they turn back to Him, God will have mercy on them.

We are weak human beings, full of sinfulness and selfishness. Like Judas, we have sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver–we have chosen sin over Him for some silly, passing satisfaction that makes no sense in the greater scheme of things.

Yet even now, at whatever age we find ourselves, even if our prior attempts at conversion have been half-hearted, even now, He is waiting to forgive us and transform us, if we return to Him with all our heart.

Lent is not a dreary season. It is another chance, even now, to convert our hearts fully to the Lord.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus to help you to take advantage of this Lent, every single day of it. Ask Him to show you your sins and give you a repentant heart. Tell Him that you want Him in your life above every single other priority, and that He has carte blanche to manage your life as He sees fit–even if this means that you will go through some suffering for your own good and that of others.

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February 16, 2021February 2, 2021

The Ark of the New Covenant

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

It is a relief that people of our age are so much better and more faithful to God than in Noah’s time; that there is no evil running rampant in our day.

Said no one, in any age, ever.

We observe the evil and misplacement of values in our time, and it is hard not to despair. We look at the punishment God meted out in Noah’s time, and we realize that it was perfectly just. Sometimes, perhaps, we even wish that God would enact a similar purge in our time.

But then, Jesus came. God, for all time, took a different tack–a tack of mercy. Evildoers will reap their just reward in eternity, but God exhibits an impossible amount of patience and mercy during the sojourn here on earth.

It is hard not to focus on faults–not only the faults of others, but also our own, as if these were the essence of the story. But they are not. Jesus’ power and love are the essence of the story. When we strive to give our “yes” to Him daily, even haltingly, in the midst of our many sins and shortcomings, He rushes in with His mercy and power to supplement our weakness, and transform us into His new creation.

The Noah story, where most of humanity got wiped out, makes sense. The introduction of Jesus into history, on the other hand, is forever surprising, unexpected–a gratuitous and definitive act of mercy on the part of God.

So it is that in today’s gospel, Jesus reproves the disciples for focusing on what is no longer relevant: their shortcomings. They neglected to bring bread. This was a gross lack of planning, responsibility, and consideration on their part, one might say. How could they forget to feed their Lord and Master, God Incarnate! And each other!

But then Jesus puts things in perspective, by reminding them of the multiplication of the loaves. “Do you still not understand?” He asks them, as if in disbelief. Do they still not understand how powerful He is to provide, and how their weaknesses and mistakes are irrelevant?

He may well say the same to us, when we wring our hands concerning our limitations and failures. “Do you still not understand?” Do we still not understand how overwhelmingly powerful this unexpected gift of the Word Made Flesh, and of His love, really is in our lives?

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Tell Jesus that at least now, at this moment, you do understand. Tell Him that you give Him your weaknesses and failures, both on the human and on the spiritual level. Tell Him that you believe in the power of His multiplication of loaves in your life–that you know too that He multiplies the good results of what you do and are, even though you don’t deserve it. Ask Him to increase in you the virtue of trust and hope.

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February 15, 2021February 1, 2021

The Yardstick

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

If today we see a clear common thread between the sin of the Pharisees at which Jesus sighs in the gospel, and the sin of Cain from centuries earlier in the first reading, perhaps we can identify an attribute common to sin in general. And if we can identify a common attribute, perhaps we can identify its seeds germinating in us, even before we fall into it, and uproot those seeds.

At first glance, Cain may appear to have a right to be disgruntled. The first reading does not specify why God wasn’t please with his offering. Maybe Cain and Abel both did the best they could, and God was being finicky.

Not likely, though. It appears safe to assume that Cain either didn’t do his best in cultivating the field, or his offering to God was not the best from what he had. He had done the primeval equivalent of phoning it in.

Cain is angry and resentful about God’s reaction to his offering. Here is where we can stop, and look at the Pharisees’ attitude for commonality.

The Pharisees ask Jesus for a sign “to test him.” The Pharisees consider themselves the arbiters, the judges, and Jesus the one who needs to prove Himself. With God Himself right in their midst, they have set themselves in His chair–on the chair of judgement, and judgement over Him.

Not so far afield from what Cain was doing. When he became disgruntled at God’s reaction, rather than using God as the measuring stick and adjusting himself accordingly, Cain used himself as the measuring stick and thus found fault with God–and ultimately, unable to punish God, he took it out on Abel. Like the Pharisees, he set himself in the judgement seat over God.

The sin of pride. There it is. Unwillingness to be schooled by God, or schooled by others.

Even Eve seems to have learned her lesson in the first reading, to have eaten some humble pie. She recognizes that she has not “become like gods” as promised by the serpent–she recognizes the Lord’s help and hand in the gift of her child.

Pride: The root of all sins, present in some way in all. Conquer pride, and you have conquered yourself.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus to give you the immeasurably valuable gift of humility, and help you to shift your measure for all things to His view, His will, His desires, His loves, rather than your view, your will, your desires, your loves.

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February 14, 2021February 16, 2021

The Leper

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

As so often happens with biblical readings, those of today are both history and allegory.

Moses was told what to do with lepers. They were to be proclaimed as unclean, and cast outside the Israelite camp. Here we see an image of the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, after their sin. All disease and uncleanliness came into the world with original sin–and more importantly, with sin, we were ostracized from the easy friendship with God that Adam and Eve enjoyed.

But with Christ, all that changes. In the gospel we see how. Simply, Jesus cures the leper. He leaves him clean, without blemish. The leper is told to keep it to himself, but he is exploding with joy. Everywhere he goes, he proclaims what God has done for him.

We must be realistic. With His death and Resurrection, Jesus did not remove all pain, suffering, and disease from Christians. With all the healing He did in life, we might have expected this to occur through the power of His Resurrection–but He did not come to overthrow Adam by utterly reversing the consequences of original sin. He came to rescue Adam, by opening for him–and us–again the door to life that Adam had closed.

But nonetheless, the time of salvation is now. Christ is healer, in our lives, now. If we gamble all on Him, if we make our relationship with Him our top priority, He will remove misery from our lives and put happiness in its place. It is not that we will have nothing to endure; what we do endure, we will bear full of His peace and joy, until that time when all suffering ends and we are united with Him forever in Heaven.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus to come and heal your heart. To heal it of all the scars left by abuse you have received. To heal it from its attachments to sin. And then, to transform it into a catalyst for the healing of others.

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February 13, 2021January 29, 2021

Bread and Fishes

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

There is something startling about today’s psalm, in light of the first reading: “In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge.”

At first glance, the first reading does not appear to paint a picture of God as refuge. Rather, we seem to find the root quintessence of the image some have of the Old Testament God as wrathful. With exclamations, God hands down the terrible consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve.

As usual with such assessments, though, this image some have of an angry God undervalues the gravity of sin–of thwarting the omnipotent God. Well might God simply have removed His thoughts from Adam and Eve, upon which they simply would have ceased to exist. Or, he could have imposed eternal damnation then and there.

Instead, the consequences He metes out are incredibly measured. He stands in the breach and reduces the impact of their sin to, effectively, a more difficult life, and one that is limited in span.

God is their refuge, even as He imposes just consequences. He Himself crafts leather garments for them. He accommodates and adapts to the new situation they have brought on for themselves through their disobedience–their shame at their nakedness.

And once salvation comes in Christ, His Providence pours out an overabundance of love. We see the full measure of what we receive in Christ prefigured in today’s gospel, in the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. He takes the good bestowed on us by nature, and in His love extends it limitlessly, without measure.

But in the end, “What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him.” (Cf. 1 Cor. 2:9) We have literally no idea how blessed we will be in eternity for having chosen, unlike Adam and Eve, obedience to God and salvation in His Christ.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Obedience takes special grace from God, won by Christ through His obedience on the Cross. Ask Jesus, among all the charisms God gives, to give you the only one that really matters in the end: The charism of obedience. Ask Him for this gift above all others, even if it were to mean sacrificing all the rest.

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February 12, 2021January 28, 2021

Not Just an Apple

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

Some may find the story of Adam and Eve’s first sin simple and unsophisticated. But though the language may be simple, the nuances of this account are anything but unsophisticated.

The act of Adam and Eve in response to the serpent’s half-truths–for the Father of Lies speaks not pure falsehoods, but half-truths to lure us to sin–their act appears hardly worthy of the collapse of all nature into a twisted taint. After all, objectively speaking, all they did was eat some fruit. Forbidden or not, how could this be so incredibly consequential?

On the contrary, objectively speaking, the essence of their act was not the consumption of fruit. It was outright, conscious, willful disobedience to God’s command.

The account is anything but unsophisticated because it captures a dichotomy that occurs with our personal sin as well. We are so quick to trivialize our sin. Why not sleep with her, even before marriage, if I love her? What can one little white fib do? Will God really condemn me for missing one Sunday Mass? Etc.

What we fail to recognize is the profound gravity of disobeying the Creator of all, when He has laid out for us His will. Never mind that much of what He forbids can openly be seen to be destructive to our nature. Disobedience to the Omnipotent brings about a cataclysmic fracture in the order of things. Hence, from the mere picking and eating of a fruit, all humankind has suffered a grave contortion of our instincts. Physical nature itself bears the scars.

For it was not the mere picking and eating of a fruit. It was disobedience to Him to whom absolute obedience is owed absolutely.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus to take everything away from you, if He must, but to preserve uncompromised your obedience to His Father. Ask Him to preserve you in an obedience that mirrors His, which impelled Him to accept willingly the most difficult fate ever visited upon human flesh.

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February 11, 2021January 27, 2021

The Box

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

Can God be kept in a box?

Solomon didn’t think so, as we see in today’s first reading. “Can it indeed be that God dwells on earth? If the heavens and the highest heavens cannot contain you, how much less this temple which I have built!”

Solomon’s humility before God is refreshing in the face of the Pharisees in today’s gospel. Fast-forward a few centuries from Solomon, and the Jewish religious authorities think they’ve managed to box God in thoroughly. They’ve hemmed Him in on every side with their niggling little precepts about cup-polishing and bed-cleansing, about helping a mule on the Sabbath but not a human being. The message is simple: Do all these little things, and you receive a get-out-of-jail free card; you don’t even have to give God a second thought. He’s placated.

And so they acted in their own lives. They roundly disregarded God and neighbor. It is perhaps especially the latter that utterly infuriates Jesus. His compassion for the needs of his fellow humans is His acute focus, and the Pharisees’ tone-setting of blithe disregard stirs His wrath.

But in the end, God can live in a box. Jesus channels His wrath, not in destruction, but in self-sacrifice, so totally encompassing mankind is His loving compassion that He even prays specifically for those killing Him, a group that includes those same Pharisees. And He does so with his some of His last breaths.

He boxes Himself into the temple of human flesh, He boxes Himself into imprisonment, suffering, and death. He suffers every limitation willingly to free us from the stifling box of our own sin, and to free us from every boundary, allowing us to taste infinity.

And ultimately, to this day, He literally boxes Himself into the tabernacle present in every Catholic Church, so that from that vantage point He can accompany us in our challenges and tribulations.

Whom all the world cannot contain, limits Himself that we may find boundlessness.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus to take you up into the dynamic, not only of the limitless of His divinity, but then also of His self-sacrifice for His creatures. Ask Him to fill you with the compassion that drove Him to distraction. Ask Him to fill you with His greatness, that you may join Him in self-giving for the needy.

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February 10, 2021January 26, 2021

Catastrophe

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

“The moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.” The last words from today’s reading: Words replete with foreboding.

Not having fully imbibed from the cup of Christ’s Redemption until we reach heaven, it is natural for us still to wish we could turn back the clock on Adam’s sin. What a catastrophe. From that one act of disobedience stem the twisted inclinations we all experience to the evils of which Christ speaks in today’s gospel: “evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.”

It all traces back to that one act of disobedience. “Adam, you fool!”, we would like to say. “Think about what you are doing!”

What we sometimes fail to realize is that our own sin sends out equally powerful ripples. We sometimes think of Adam’s sin with a capital “s,” and our own with a small “s.” It is not so. Sin is sin. It is disobedience against God. We can say, “I sin because I am weakened by Adam’s original sin.” This is an excuse equally pathetic to Adam’s: ““The woman whom you put here with me—she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate it.” (Gn. 3:12) When we sin, we ourselves are the fools.

Every day–every single day–we have the opportunity to put right Adam’s wrong, by choosing to obey God in all, rather than disobey; rather than cutting corners on His will for our own short-sighted motives.

Every day, we have the opportunity to put right Adam’s wrong through our whole-hearted “yes” to the Redemption from sin that Jesus Christ brought.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Tell Jesus that although sometimes you are insensitive to it, you accept the gravity of your own sin. Tell Him again your unconditional “yes,” that you never wish to be parted from Him or to sin again, and ask Him for His help in overturning Adam’s sin through your faithfulness this day.

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February 9, 2021January 26, 2021

Paradise Lost, Paradise Found

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

In Jesus’ condemnation of the attitude of the Pharisees we see how man has corrupted the beautiful destiny God assigned to Him, the destiny we see in the first reading–to rule as just monarch over all creation.

Instead, the Pharisees of Jesus’ time and so, so many in our time as well seek oppression of their fellow man in order to secure their own dominance and power.

The gift of God at creation, dominance over that creation, was lost to man with original sin, and ever since he pitiably seeks to establish some semblance of his sense of dignity, nobility, and greatness. He seeks cheap dominance over his brothers and sisters, and a vain, passing taste of superiority.

The entire story arc of Jesus’ life, and by extension the life of His faithful followers, is the exact inverse of this pitiable clawing for scraps of self-worth. Jesus does not seek to rise, but indeed descends and abases Himself by taking on flesh, out of love. He comes from a place of infinite superiority and perfect security to make Himself the vulnerable servant.

We, His followers, will never get beyond the shadow of the ideal of following in Jesus’ humble footsteps if we do not first fill ourselves with His greatness, His security through our relationship with Him in prayer and in the sacraments. A full dose of these gifts of Jesus comes slowly, through a steadfast commitment to a sometimes “unfulfilling” stretch of daily contemplative prayer. But the reward is a complete upending of our miserable lives, turned over to represent the descending and re-ascending arc of Jesus as we give ourselves to our fellow humans.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Tell Jesus that you want the destiny He has come to give you, which transcends even the original greatness and nobility of Adam. Then ask Him to give you the courage and the means to follow His story arc of self-forgetfulness to bring other humans to the same destiny that you have found.

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February 8, 2021March 4, 2021

Why Create for Spoilage?

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

Imagine the writer of the first reading from the book of Genesis, who penned his work centuries before the birth of Christ. At first he seems so different from you and me–no electronics, no convenient transportation, no media.

But as we read his description of creation, we see that his experiences are not so different–in some ways, perhaps better than ours. We dream of spending time outdoors, in the fields among flowers, in the sea–these are the things of which this author writes, the things of his experience. In some senses, it would appear that the stuff of his day-to-day is the stuff of our dreams.

And in his description of these elements, we hear about things intimate and familiar to us, things that we experience with the same perception of beauty and sense of awe that he did.

And because it is the moment of creation that he describes, everything appears so fresh, so untainted, so innocent. We almost wonder: Would God have gone to all this trouble, if he had known what was coming–if he had known, for example, of the people we see in today’s gospel, utterly desperate with infirmity? If He had foreseen the full misery caused by sin?

And yet, the Lord and origin of this immensely beautiful creation did in fact foresee; He did know how sin and evil would twist, contort, and putrefy the beauty that He had created. And yet, He did not hesitate.

For as much as we appreciate the beauty of creation, there is one reality that we do not fully appreciate in all its splendor and crowning glory: The beauty, and transforming power, of Redemption. It is because of Redemption that He moved forward.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus for faith in the restorative power of His Redemption, even though we do not yet see that power fully play out here on earth. Ask Him to see all with such acute eyes of faith that His redemptive work appears to your heart as vividly as the physical world appears to your eyes.

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