This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.
In today’s first reading, God is not reproving His people for their sins, as He sometimes does. Rather, He is offering them hope as He calls them to conversion–hope for full restoration.
And it will come to light that this hope has a name: It is Jesus Christ. Jesus, the great Physician whom we see in today’s gospel.
It is beautiful to abandon our sins wholly, over and over again, in the sacrament of confession, thus exposing our wounds to this great Physician and allowing Him to do the work that He came to do.
Of course, the placement of these readings in Lent is no accident–it is the season of conversion.
It is interesting to reflect that, in addition to our sins, we have our simple human weaknesses. Maybe we struggle with attention span. Perhaps we don’t have as much energy for the day as we would like, or the kind of mental abilities we would like for planning and analyzing. These weaknesses can discourage us sometimes as much as our sins. People can be cruel by forming judgements of us only based on our weaknesses.
Jesus didn’t come to make us different from what we are; He didn’t come to make us good at everything. But what He does promise is that He loves us as we are, as His Father has created us. He loves us with our strengths, and with our weaknesses.
And we know that this love transforms us to participate in the divine nature itself, without taking away the particularities of our human nature, or of our own individual nature.
In the act of loving us, Jesus makes our strengths twice as valuable, and our weaknesses unimportant, as frustrating as they may sometimes be. His love itself transforms the value that we bring to the welfare of others into something beyond measure.
Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Consider the weaknesses that most frustrate you. Tell Jesus that you give them to Him, and ask Him to make your life valuable for His Kingdom in spite of them–with full trust and confidence that He will do so, beyond your imaginings. Then, ask Him forgiveness for the ways you neglect and offend Him in sin, and trust there too that the great Physician heals you.
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