RETREAT IN LENT 2021
Day 42,
Tuesday, 30 March
‘I have exhausted myself for nothing’
Today we read another ‘Song of the Servant’ (Isaiah
49:1-6), expressing the suffering of Jesus, this time the mental anguish,
‘I have toiled in vain; I have exhausted myself for nothing.’ In the gospel (John
13:21-38) Jesus is ‘troubled in spirit’ as he knows what Judas will do.
We know so many stories of people struggling alone; women
whose husbands have died or left them and they have to struggle to bring up
their children alone. Or people in war zones – Yemen, Tigray, the east of the
Congo and now northern Mozambique. We see pictures of them. We feel their anguish.
The People of God now sing the Song of the Servant in so many corners of the
globe. Even in developed ‘settled’ countries there is the anguish of
loneliness, imprisonment, drug addiction. This is the passion of the world.
When Jesus went to his passion, he knew he was embracing this
other passion – ours. Desolate and exhausted that he was, he knew that he would
inaugurate a new age in which the suffering of the world would be overcome.
When people of faith share in the suffering of others and do not hide from it
in comfortable cocoons, there is the promise of overcoming it.
In the year that has passed since last Easter the world has
woken up to know that ‘Black Lives Matter’, that Covid knows no boundaries and
that the earth is warming to a degree that is almost out of control. Everywhere
there are signs that people are ‘pushing back’ against the evils connected with
these things.
May we have the grace this Holy Week to labour in the sure
belief that we do not labour in vain or exhaust ourselves for nothing.
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