Year A / Lent
/ Week 4 / Sunday
Readings: 1
Samuel 16.1b, 6-7, 10-13a / Psalm 23.1-3a, 3b-4, 5-6 (R/v 1) / Ephesians
5.8-14 / John 9.1-41
This week our JC1 and 2
footballers will compete for the first time in the A Division Football
competition. They are a young and inexperienced team, but they have enthusiasm,
passion and determination. They have trained long and hard to get here. This is
why I have every confidence that they will play well to win for St Joseph's Institution.
At the end of their first half
of their first game, I imagine Coach Kadir addressing them in this way: “That’s it. The first half is
over. Time to regroup gentlemen.” It will be a welcomed halftime. The team have
the opportunity to gather themselves again. They can rethink their strategies
and refocus their efforts. Their actions will be about re-creating themselves as a stronger,
more spirited team for the second half, especially, if they are down a goal or
two.
I’d like to suggest that re-creation is a theme
in today’s readings. Our Eucharistic Preface echoes this theme when it prays
for our regeneration as God’s adopted children.
Our First Reading tells of God choosing David
to be the new king for Israel. Through the prophet Samuel’s anointing, God
re-creates David: he is no longer shepherd boy but king. Our Gospel
Reading tells of Jesus healing the man born blind. Through Jesus’ healing, God
re-creates this man: he is no longer a blind man and an unbeliever but a
believer and a follower of Jesus as Lord.
God re-created David and the blind man to witness to God’s
saving action in their lives. What about us? Are we letting God re-create us on our
Lenten journey? Why would God want to do this?
Our Psalm helps us understand that God wants to re-create us so that we can be with him
eternally.
Here is God the Good Shepherd who wants to
walk with us through our darkness and to free us from all that oppress us. Here God who wants to set us on right
paths that lead to no other place than to his table where we will feast
together. And in a remarkable sign of God’s love, here is God who wants to anoint our heads, fill us with
all that is good and kind, and let us stay with him all the days of our lives.
This vision of eternal life with God is not a
future event we await. Neither is it a reward for us rigidly obeying the
Church’s rules and regulations. Rather, it is God’s unmerited gift given us
already. Paul assures us that this
is so in our second reading. God has given us this gift through Jesus’ death
and resurrection. God has done this to save us from sin and death, and to bring
us into eternal friendship with Godself. God’s action has indeed re-created us
as God’s own. This is why Christians are indeed children of light, Paul writes;
we are to live in God’s light and to be God’s light for one another.
No other reason explains this action of God
than love—God’s prodigious love for us, a love without limit or bias, a love
that is freely given and unreservedly outpoured for all, no matter how much we struggle
with sinfulness and fail.
Today, we are at the mid-point of Lent. Throughout
Lent, God has been reaching out to share with us his merciful and saving love. God
does not just reach out to us in our sinfulness; he reaches out because we are
his re-created children that Jesus has already saved. Have we welcomed God’s
love into our lives in the first half of Lent? Or, do we have to adjust our
lives even more to let God better re-create and perfect us as God’s own in these
remaining Lenten days?
Only when we dare to grapple with these
questions will we appreciate what God is offering us today: the grace of halftime.
Halftime is important in every soccer and
rugby, basketball and hockey game played. Halftime provides a short rest
to refresh and to recharge. Halftime permits us to look at what worked well in
the first half, and to stay the course if all is going as planned. Or, if
we’ve played the first half badly, halftime is about taking stock, evaluating,
confessing what went wrong and planning anew to finish the game well. Halftime
is the opportunity to regroup and review, reconsider and reposition ourselves
to return to the game with greater focus and clarity, and with renewed energy
for this next half.
God is inviting us to do the same at this
halftime mark in our Lenten journey. To do this, we need to be truthful about
our Lenten life, open to the need for change and keen to cooperate with God to
change.
How much our Lenten journey will re-create us
more and more into bearing Jesus’ image and likeness depends on our sincerity
and enthusiasm to make this year’s Lent different from last year. To
accomplish this, we need to change the way we do Lent. If we do this responsibly
and honestly, we might discover
how we are sometimes blind to God this Lent, and to what God is offering us in Jesus—merciful love
that saves and re-creates us anew.
There might be several reasons why each of us
might be blind. We may have become too familiar with what Lent is, and so
we do not bother enough with practising the Lenten discipline. We may be too apathetic or lazy to make the needed changes. We may be too careless with our "take-it-for-granted" attitude
that God will always forgive, so this year's Lent is just like every other year before. I know the blindness I have this year and that I need to work on. What about you?
If we chose to remain blind to God's desire to
re-create us this Lent, we pay a costly price: God can’t perfect us in his saving
love. Such a choice makes us like the real blind men in today’s gospel, the
Pharisees. They could see but they chose not see who Jesus is, the Christ, and
what Jesus offered, eternal life. Their refusal lost them the graced
opportunity to be re-created for life with God. In contrast, the blind man’s
openness to Jesus, and to believing in Jesus as the Christ, saved his sight and
his soul.
For Pope Francis, Lent is a journey towards
becoming a new person whose destination is to remain in the love of Jesus
Christ forever. Throughout Lent thus far, you and me have been striving to
become such persons so as to better reach the Christian destination—home with
Jesus and sharing God’s life. This is the resurrected life Easter joy gives us
a foretaste of.
It is timely then for us to reflect on God and
God’s saving love for us, but, more so, on how we are responding, at this
halftime in Lent. For all that we have lived well and helped us change for the
better, let’s give thanks and stay the course. For all that we have not been
doing right thus far to let God perfect us, let us be honest and make those necessary
actions now so that we can finish our Lenten journey well.
The good news is that there is still time to
let God work in our lives to turn us around, if we but let God do so.
So, let us make full use of this halftime
opportunity. Let us embrace it with the kind of hope that Lent calls us to
believe in—that with Jesus, in Jesus and through Jesus, we will die to our
sinfulness to arise with him to the fullness of life. In that moment, we will
know the true joy of Easter.
In fact, I believe that if we listen to Jesus as the coach of
our life and faith on our Lenten journey we might hear him echo this hope-filled joy in this way:
“the first half is gone, everyone; there’s only the second half now. So, go out
there, do better and make good the next half! All is not lost. The best is yet to be!”
Preached at St Ignatius Parish, Singapore
Photo: jesseswanson.com, 2010
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