Day 14, Tuesday, 2 March You, however, …

 

RETREAT IN LENT 2021

Day 14, Tuesday, 2 March 

You, however, …

Lent continues to hammer home its message. I would never call myself a Pharisee (Matthew 23:1-12) but I do sometimes slip into their ways. I like recognition. It warms my heart to be respected, praised, made a fuss of. I thank God for my success. I have a disturbing feeling that ‘the system’ works for my benefit. It doesn’t for many other people I see on the road who ‘haven’t made it’. It is a pity but what can I do about it?

The very first chapter of Isaiah (1:10, 16-20) calls us to a change of heart, ‘let us talk the this over, says the Lord.’ The prophets give us a message of God literally thirsting for humans to respond to his love. They continually recall the ‘great deeds’ of God – in creation, in the vocation of Israel, in the gift of a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ – and through dramatic words and actions call people to attend to what God promises when the Messiah comes. Jesus takes up the work and tells the Jews they are like children who refuse to play the game (Matthew 11:11).

Why is God so insistent? Why doesn’t he just arrange things as we want them – for our own peace and comfort?

Well, the minute we think of it we realise that we all have different wants and they conflict with each other. If we are not restrained - by custom, tradition, law - there would be chaos. As the old saying goes, the world has enough goods for our need but not for our greed. God has not created a chaotic world but one that is ‘groaning’ to come to birth; it is on its way to come to its fulfilment (Romans 8:22) and it all depends on us. It is in our hands. Both climate change and Covid 19 remind us of this.

God is asking us to go beyond the self-centred ways of the Pharisees. He is inviting us to be signs of a better world. This calls us to be people of depth, who get below the surface on which our world likes to live.