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Into the Pit

Pit

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


Lenten Mass readings on many days focus on repentance, purification, and God’s mercy. On some days, though, they foreshadow the events of Holy Week–specifically, Jesus’ suffering and death.

Today’s readings are of the latter type.

Have you ever felt that someone was plotting against you? That in one way or another, they were trying to get rid of you, because you were in their way? It is not an entirely uncommon human occurrence. It is dehumanizing; we feel what it is like to be treated like objects–specifically, objects in the way of others’ aims. The experience is the exact opposite of that of being loved for our own sake, of others seeking our happiness for its own sake, simply because we are human.

Jeremiah went through this experience. His contemporaries were plotting against his life because they found his words and challenges inconvenient. They imagined that they would incur no disadvantage from killing Jeremiah, because–they thought–there were other good preachers and prophets around.

It did not occur to them that Jeremiah was prophesying in direct obedience to God, and thus that they would be killing the anointed messenger of God himself.

Jeremiah cried out to God for help, with words similar to today’s psalm: “Save me, O Lord, in your kindness.”

And later, save him God did. Having been cast into a pit, he was rescued and ultimately enjoyed favor when Babylon conquered Jerusalem.

But, we may say, Jeremiah’s salvation did not come without a price. Jesus, the very Son of God Himself, would pay that price by taking the place foreshadowed by Jeremiah as He who would die to remove an obstacle for others–not the obstacle imagined by His enemies, but the obstacle of sin, barring the way into eternal life.

How unfair it feels to us when we are treated as objects, and done grave harm casually by another for the avoidance of their inconvenience. This Lent, without waiting for Holy Week, let us meditate on Jesus’ experience of this; let us drink deeply of His humiliation in prayer. And let us pledge to join Him in personal sacrifice for the eternal and temporal welfare of our brothers and sisters.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Contemplate Jesus’ passion, when He was arrested and brought before the Sanhedrin, who cared nothing for His welfare, but rather only for their own chance at success in getting rid of Him. Contemplate how, paradoxically, he yearned for their real fulfillment and happiness and suffered at the tragically erroneous path they were taking in its pursuit. Ask Him to share with you the innermost feelings and thoughts of His Heart as He began to suffer His passion.

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Underrated

Eintstein

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


There is a humorous contrast of one element of today’s Scripture passages relative to all the rest. It is not the first reading, which speaks of the wonderful effectiveness of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the one eternal High Priest. It is not the psalm, which celebrates the entry of that High Priest into His glory.

It is not the gathering of the crowd in the gospel, clamoring to get close to Jesus, the great healer, who as High Priest saves people even from their physical illnesses.

Rather, it is that last line in the gospel, where Jesus’ relatives try to seize Him because they think He is “out of His mind.”

Have you ever felt misunderstood? Have you seen your good intentions misinterpreted? You are in good company.

The King of Splendor, the great High Priest whose entire human existence was focused on the unmerited salvation of mankind, found himself considered to be nuts, by His own family members.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Jesus’ entire sojourn on earth was continuously filled with the misunderstanding and scorn of lesser hearts and minds. Think of times when you have been misunderstood, or slighted. Offer to Jesus those moments, past, present and future, as part of your overall gift of self to Him. Ask Him to transform you by His saving grace into a person who can contribute through your self-offering to His saving mission.

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Go Down to Go Up

Subway

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


A fundamental dynamic of salvation history, that is, a dynamic of God’s interaction with the human person after the fall, emerges as a theme in all the readings today. It is the dynamic of the human person experiencing humility and humiliation as a condition of reaching the destiny of high exaltation to which God calls every person redeemed by His son. The experience of the dynamic humiliation-exaltation yields a third reality, which is profound gratitude on the part of the redeemed.

In the first reading, Hannah experiences for a long period the humiliation of sterility. God answers her pleas for a child, and in gratitude she consecrates the boy to God, quite literally making a gift of him at the temple.

Hannah prefigures the reality of the Blessed Virgin Mary expressed so beautifully in the today’s gospel. Mary needed no humiliation event to come into intimate contact with her own lowliness. She was ever-conscious of her smallness before God. It is not the suffering of humiliation that pleases God as He instructs us; He merely wants us to be fully aware of our littleness, as the key to understanding our dependency on Him for our happiness and seeking a relationship with Him above all else. Mary had this awareness without the need for any bitter lesson.

As such, Mary’s gratitude is arguably even more pure than that of someone like Hannah, who passed through the experience of bitter humiliation; Mary had made perfect peace with her littleness from early on, which made God’s exaltation of her that much more of an unexpected surprise.

To the degree that we come into intimate contact with our smallness before God, and our need for a close union with Him for our happiness, to that degree the beauty of Mary’s Magnificat resonates with us.

As is often the case, today’s psalm sums up the lesson well for us:

The well-fed hire themselves out for bread,
while the hungry batten on spoil.
The barren wife bears seven sons,
while the mother of many languishes.

As we prepare for Christmas in the final days, we foresee the dynamic from today’s readings play out with the extreme of beauty in the mystery of the Incarnation. It is Jesus, God Himself, who enters into the dynamic of humiliation directly, by taking on flesh and ultimately suffering the epitome of degradation at the hands of sinners with His Passion and death. And the beauty of it is, He does so not for the benefit of any personal exaltation, but that we may come to be exalted. He takes on the dynamic of humiliation for us.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Speak with Our Lady, in this time before Christmas. Ask her to help you appreciate the dynamic of humiliation and to open your heart to it. Ask her to look after you as your Mother during the necessary period of humiliation that this life involves, if we are to be exalted with her Son–so that it does not embitter your heart against God, but leads to a profound awareness of your need for Him.

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