Readings
In Matthew’s gospel, chapters 5-7, Jesus speaks to his disciples from a mountain, a place Moses once chose to speak to the Jews, but Jesus speaks God’s revelation to a wider world from a mountain. His words are loyal to the Jewish traditions and laws that Moses taught. He’s not abolishing them. He came “not to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
First, remember them. That’s what the Jewish scriptures tell us to do. “Take care and be earnestly on your guard not to forget the things which your own eyes have seen, nor let them slip from your memory as long as you live, but teach them to your children and to your children’s children.”
Lent calls us to remember.
Second, practice them, from the greatest of the commandments to the least. Lent leads us to great thoughts and great visions of faith, but this season reminds us to remember and to do small things as well. “A cup of cold water,” a prisoner, someone sick visited, someone naked clothed, someone hungry fed, “a word to the weary to rouse them.”
The law of God often comes down to small things like these. They’re always at hand, readily available. They’re within our power to do, and the greatest in God’s kingdom are best at doing them.
Lord, may your teaching from the mountain
reach the whole world and bring us peace.
Never let us forget your words,
and help us to live by them.
Never let us forget the small acts of love.
Peter’s question about forgiveness in today’s gospel ( “How many times must I forgive my brother?”) isn’t just his question. He’s asking the question for all of us.
Measure your forgiveness by God’s forgiveness, Jesus says to Peter. It’s beyond measure, and he gives Peter and all of us a story of two servants. Both are involved in a money operation gone wrong. As we know money brings out the worst in people.
There’s a big difference in the money owed. The first servant owes ten thousand talents, a huge sum, and in a unexpected display of mercy, his master forgives the entire debt.
After being forgiven so much, however, that servant sends off to debtors prison another servant who owes him a few denarii, a small sum. The ten thousand talents his master has forgiven him would be worth about 10 million denarii. Big difference!
The story isn’t our only teacher, however. God’s unmeasurable forgiveness finds its greatest expression in the passion and death of Jesus: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” he cries out from the cross. He pleads, not for one, or a few, but for the whole world. Jesus reveals the mercy of God beyond measure.
We’re called to measure our forgiveness of others against his.
Lord, let me hear your call for forgiveness from the cross,
and let me make your call mine.
“Jesus said to his disciples: ‘You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies,
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” (Matthew 5: 43-48)
When people talk about love today, they’re usually focused on romantic love, “falling in love”, or loving yourself. Not much talk about loving others or loving your enemies today.
“Love your enemies”, Jesus says in today’s gospel. Have a love that imitates God’s love, our heavenly Father “who makes his sun rise on the bad and the good and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”
Is that love beyond us?
We’ve been told from earliest years that there are some people you can’t trust; they’ll take advantage of you; they’ll harm you. You have enemies in this world. Be careful.
Certainly Jesus doesn’t condemn reasonable caution. He had enemies too and he was careful what he said and how he dealt with them. Evil exists. Rather, Jesus warns against a pessimism that leads us to condemn someone or some groups absolutely. We see no possible goodness or possible change in them, only intractable evil.
We don’t see as God sees when we think like that. The sun of God’s goodness shines on this world; the rain of his mercy softens its hardest places. His love changes people for the good.
We can’t just reason our way to a love of enemies, we must pray to grow in this love. Jesus not only taught us, but showed us by his own example how to love our enemies. Look at him in his Passion, says St. Aelred:
Teach us, Lord, a love like yours,
that never gives up or draw limits,
or settles for those in its small circle.
Help us to love like the sun and the rain
that reach everywhere.
Lent begins next Wednesday, February 14th. Some years ago a publisher asked me to write a book entitled A Lenten Journey with Jesus Christ and St. Paul of the Cross, to be part of a series of reflections on the daily lenten gospels that included thoughts of saints of different religious orders. The book has just been translated into Japanese.
I was initially skeptical about the project. From early on I’ve seen lent as a time to give up something and take up some devotional practice like the Stations of the Cross. Yes, Lent was a journey with Jesus, and I appreciate the daily scriptures that take us through the season with him, but where does a saint come in, even a saint important to me, like St. Paul of the Cross, the 18th century founder of my community the Passionists ?
Working on the book made me see lent differently. First, for St. Paul of the Cross lent was a time to leave the quiet mountain at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea where he lived and prayed and go to work in the Tuscan Maremma, then a swampy, malaria infested region of Italy, overrun with robbers and desperately poor. All through lent, carrying a cross and a bible Paul went from village to village preaching God’s love to people whose lives were often on edge with fear and lost hope.
Lent isn’t a time for turning inward, away from world you live in, Paul reminds me. Lent is a time to go out to the wounded world before you.
Secondly, Paul engaged his world, the world of the Tuscan Maremma, in the light of the gospel, especially the Passion of Jesus Christ. For him that mystery was not limited to a time long ago, when Jesus suffered on a Cross; it was there in the people before him. From village to village, he held up a Cross to anyone who would hear as a mirror of their reality and a pledge of the great mercy of God. Jesus died and rose again.
The Passionists celebrate two feasts immediately before Ash Wednesday to prepare for Lent. Last Friday we celebrated the Commemoration of the Passion of Jesus Christ. Tomorrow, Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, we celebrate the Prayer of Jesus in the Garden. Both feasts come from our missionary founder.
I can see him packing his bags for his lenten journey down the quiet mountain for the villages and towns of the Tuscan Maremma. He must remind himself what he will see. He must pray so he doesn’t forget.
“May the Passion of Jesus Christ be always in our hearts.”
These are days to reflect on the mystery of the Incarnation. A decisive revelation of God, the Letter to the Hebrews says:
“At various times in the past and in various different ways, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets; but in our own time, the last days, he has spoken to us through his Son, the Son that he has appointed to inherit everything and through whom he made everything there is.(Hebrews 1, 1-2)”
What does Jesus Christ reveal about God? He is the Word of God who reveals God to us, St. Bernard says, and in him “the kindness and love of God has been revealed and we receive abundant consolation in this pilgrimage, this exile, this distress.”
Before he appeared as human, God’s kindness lay concealed, Bernard says. “Of course it was already in existence, because the mercy of the Lord is from eternity, but how could we know it was so great? It was promised but not yet experienced: hence many did not believe in it. At various times and in various different ways, God spoke through the prophets, saying I know the plans I have in mind for you: plans for peace, not disaster…”
“What greater proof could he have given of his mercy than by taking upon himself what needed mercy most? Where is there such perfect loving-kindness as in the fact that for our sake the Word of God became perishable like the grass? Lord, what is man, that you make much of him or pay him any heed?”
“See how much God cares for us. See what God thinks of us, what he feels about us. Don’t look at your own sufferings; look at God’s sufferings. Learn from what he was made for you, how much he makes of you; let his kindness be seen in his humanity.”
“ The lesser he has made himself in his humanity, the greater has he shown himself in kindness. The more he humbles himself on my account, the more powerfully he engages my love. The kindness and humanity of God our Saviour appeared says St Paul. The humanity of God shows the greatness of his kindness, and he who added humanity to the name of God gave great proof of this kindness.”
Education is up in the air these days. Our schools are struggling. How will kids be educated?
Our faith formation programs are struggling too. The Mass and sacraments–ordinary ways we pray–are drastically curtailed. What do we do?
Could our homes and families become our churches? Can we find teachers and temporary sacraments there?
A friend of mine was in prison for awhile and ended up once in solitary confinement after a fight he had with another inmate. He told me he remembered in the dark what a nun had told him about the rosary. Ten Hail Mary’s and an Our Father. He started counting the prayers on his fingers and, after awhile, he found a great peace came over him, so much so that after getting out of confinement he asked the chaplain for a rosary. It led to a profound conversion. He was changed by the experience there in the dark.
We’re living in the dark these days, but do these days have to diminish us? Maybe we can learn to pray more simply these days. Simple prayers we may have abandoned, maybe there’s a bible or a prayerbook lying forgotten in a drawer. Simple prayers are always the best, because God takes simple form to come to us. Jesus came “in the form of a slave,” remember, he used simple things like bread and wine to bring us his greatest gift.
This could be a time to pray simple prayers and to teach them to our kids. You never know when they’ll bring them peace.
Little prayers are just that–the small, taken-for-granted prayers we pray all the time. Like “Amen.” How many times do we say that word in prayer? Usually we end all our prayers with it.
What does it mean? I suppose we could say it means “yes” in English. “Si” in Spanish or Italian. “Ya” in German. If you look it up in the dictionary, you find it traced back into the Greek and then to the Hebrew. Amen means “so be it”; a strong “yes,” and it’s been part of the language of our faith for centuries.
Here we are in the 21st century using a word generations before us have used; we draw on the faith of generations before us to say, “Yes, I believe,” “Amen” to God’s word to us and our word to God.
“The Lord be with you,” “And with your spirit.” Another little prayer, wishing that God be with us and bring us together in faith. We can trace that little prayer back generations too.
Little prayers can give us a way to express what we can hardly put into words or understand. Besides words, they can also be simple gestures, like the Sign of the Cross; they can be moments of listening or seeing and waiting in silent attention before God.
Psalm 123 describes a servant waiting and watching before her mistress.
“To you I lift up my eyes,
you who dwell in the heavens.
My eyes like the eyes of slaves
On the hand of their lords.
Like the eyes of a servant
On the hand of her mistress,
So our eyes are on the Lord our God
Till he show us his mercy.”
Little prayers can be a cry or even tears. You often hear that kind of prayer in the psalms:
“I cried to you, Lord, and you heard me,” the psalmist says in Psalm 30.
Remember the simple cry of the Canaanite woman: “Have pity on me, Son of David…Please, Lord” (Matthew 15:21).
Little prayers are important, they’re not little at all.
Praying the Hail Mary, we ask Mary the Mother of Jesus to lead us to God. The prayer’s earliest form developed in the middle ages with the simple greeting of the angel Gabriel at Nazareth, from St. Luke’s gospel:
Hail Mary,
full of grace,
the Lord is with you.
You are favored by God, the angel announces to her. She brought Jesus Christ into the world. That message continues through the ages and is reflected in us. Like her, we are favored by God and called to bring God’s Son into the world. God’s promise of grace to Mary echoes in God’s promise to us. As promised to Mary, God will be with us.
Over time her cousin Elizabeth’s greeting to Mary, also recorded in St. Luke, was added to the prayer:
Blessed are you among women
and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
Finally by the 15th century, the remainder of the prayer appeared:
Holy Mary, mother of God,
pray for us sinners
now and at the hour of our death.
The prayer asks Mary, full of the grace of her Son, to intercede for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. She is a model for believers and she knows what it means to believe. She who knew her Son so well, can teach us the way to him.
On Calvary Jesus entrusted her to us as a mother when he said to his disciple “Behold your mother.” Ever since, she brings Christ into this world. She knew Jesus from the beginning and witnessed his life, death and resurrection. She helps us to know him. She also knows our needs. Aware of the needs of the newly married couple at Cana in Galilee, she approached Jesus, her Son. She is aware of our needs too.
By the end of the 16th century the practice of saying 150 Hail Marys in series or decades of 10 became popular among many ordinary Christians. Helped by her they remembered the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. That practice of prayer is known now as the Rosary.
Mary is a model of faith for Christians. When the angel Gabriel came to her, she believed the words he spoke even to the dark test of Calvary. She helps the family of believers on their journey to believe..
The Hail Mary and the Rosary are blessed prayers, simple and profound. They’re not beyond anyone’s reach; their repetition brings peace to the soul. They draw us into the joys, sorrows and glory of Jesus, the world Mary knows so well. We hope to “imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through Christ, Our Lord. Amen”
We will be celebrating the Feast of the Assumption of Mary this month..
You would expect a great theologian like St. Bonaventure (July 17) to tell you to hit the books if you would want to go to God. After all, his treatise we read on his feast is called “The Journey of the Mind to God.”
Instead he directs us to Christ and the Cross as our way to God.
” If you ask how such things can occur, seek the answer in God’s grace, not in doctrine; in the longing of the will, not in the understanding; in the sighs of prayer, not in research; seek the bridegroom not the teacher; God and not man; darkness not daylight; and look not to the light but rather to the raging fire that carries the soul to God with intense fervour and glowing love.”
A shelf of scripture commentaries and theology books wont bring us wisdom of themselves, St. Bonaventure says in his Breviloquium, otherwise only scholars would enter the kingdom of heaven.
“The stream of holy Scripture flows not from human research but from revelation by God. It springs from the Father of lights, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth takes its name. From him, through his Son Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit flows into us; and through the Holy Spirit, giving, at will, different gifts to different people, comes the gift of faith, and through faith Jesus Christ has his dwelling in our hearts. This is the knowledge of Jesus Christ which is the ultimate basis of the solidity and wisdom of the whole of holy Scripture…
If we are to follow the direct path of Scripture and come straight to the final destination, then right from the beginning – when simple faith starts to draw us towards the light of the Father – our hearts should kneel down and ask the Father to give us, through his Son and the Holy Spirit, true knowledge of Jesus and of his love. Once we know him and love him like this, we shall be made firm in faith and deeply rooted in love, and we can know the breadth, length, depth and height of holy Scripture.”
Sounds like Gregory of Nysaa, doesn’t it?
The Victor's Place 
