On the Eve of Lent: Some Thoughts to Understand Anew

Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 6 / Tuesday

Readings: Genesis 6.5-8; 7.1-5, 10 / Responsorial Psalm 28 / Mark 8.14-21

“Do you still not understand?”

I wonder how we would each react if Jesus says this to us who encounter his loving action in our lives daily, and who may not see it and get it still, like the disciples to whom Jesus addressed this question once to.

In today’s gospel story, after two miraculous feedings, the disciples are fretting over the fact that they failed to bring along enough food. Jesus’ many questions to the disciples betray his exasperation with their dim-wittedness. “Don’t you get it?” is what Jesus is really trying to tell them.

In this story, Jesus instructs them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. He does this not because he expects them to bake bread and wants them to be sure to get the right brand of yeast. Rather,  by talking about bread and leaven in today’s gospel story, Jesus is inviting his disciples and us to focus on God’s many interventions into our daily lives to establish God’s reign in our world. Jesus message is: God will provide what is needed for that to happen. No one else but God can do this.

We all know that leaven is one way to make things happen. It causes dough to rise and grape juice to become wine. It is leaven that causes the transformation; not our human action. Yet all too often we want to be in control, we want to engineer the change, we want to ensure all things turn out right in our care. Isn’t this true of how we sometimes understand our Christian mission of getting the job done well, or our Christian life of always getting it right?

But today Jesus’ words and actions teach us otherwise: that as far as God’s reign in our lives and in the world is concern, it cannot be us who will make the change. It is God. Yes, the reign of God will come; it will come through God’s power. We have to let it. We have to hope for it. And, as Jesus taught us in the Lord’s Prayer, we have to pray for it. 

If the disciples failed to grasp what Jesus was about and how his actions will establish the reign of God and allow it to shine forth, can you and I be so sure that we have it all figured out—this “all” being how we want to bring about God’s reign in our lives and the lives of others? 

Lent begins tomorrow. This is the Church’s annual invitation to us to renew our relationship with God. This time is not so much a time for pious practices, as it is about  helping us get the proper perspective on our priorities and preconceptions in relation to God’s ways. And then recognizing honestly how much each of us needs to realign our lives to God’s life, we would be wise to humble ourselves and to ask God to help us see things as God sees them. 

This is why it is very good that we gather on this last evening before Lent to hear and pray these words of Jesus, “Do you still not understand?” They are not harsh words, as they are challenging words. As we enter into Lent, I believe they can better guide our focus onto the kind of Lenten renewal God wishes for each of us. But we cannot focus well unless we dare to surrender ourselves into God’s hands; then we might truly understand how God’s actions in our lives always redeems us to share God's life fully, not in some distant future to come but now. 

Preached at the Lasalle Brothers’ Community, SJI

Photo: amandamarkel.com