Monday of the Eighth Week in Course 2025
This is one of those liturgical weeks that gets started in one direction and then heads off in another mid-week. Of course, I’m talking about Wednesday as the turn-around day, Ash Wednesday, which begins the universally recognized time of Lent. So we should look at today and tomorrow as lead-in days for our solemn season dedicated to fasting, almsgiving and prayer.
Our first reading is from the collection of proverbs known as Sirach. It looks like an exhortation to look toward the heart and mind of God, who sees every sin of every human being. How can God be so aware of every good and bad deed? Our problem in imagining such a thing is that we are so busy with the nitty-gritty of life on earth, our limited time and limited location and weak wills, that we are uncomfortable with the transcendence of God. There is only one God, the God we worship, and the one thing we can be certain of is that God is not what some movie characters call “the guy up there.” God is only “up there” in the sense that His being is way beyond our ability to comprehend. We can stand under God's mystery, His greatness, His uniqueness, and admire or adore Him. That’s the extent of our “understanding,” to stand beneath his Being. But we can never comprehend. Yet God creates and sustains us in our own existence, so He knows everything about us.
If we give alms to a poor person, or to a charitable organization that takes care of the poor, God knows and cherishes our good actions like precious jewels. If we, having sinned and done evil to another human or God, we can’t just assume on God’s mercy. We must actively repent and seek His forgiveness. He will forgive us, because of His infinite compassion and understanding, but we cannot ignore the infinite insult our evil actions offer our loving God.
Perhaps as a start, we should examine our thoughts and verbal expressions before Lent begins and get rid of the OMG comments in our text messages, among other things.
Our psalm today, from the thirty-second psalm in the collection, gives us thoughts and feelings about the forgiveness of God for our sins. Experiencing that forgiveness and responding to it begins, like any twelve-step program, with acknowledging our evil action. We all know that Denial is one of our most frequent refuges, and we also know that when we try to hide in Denial, our consciences kick us out pretty quickly. Lent becomes the time when we stop denying and begin repenting.
St. Mark’s Gospel brings to mind one of the most emotionally loaded stories from the life of Christ. A man runs up to Jesus and asks “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He must have felt pretty good when the Master repeats the commandments of Moses guiding our actions to each other, because he then says “Teacher, all these I have observed from my youth.” Jesus, son of the Father who gave Moses those laws, looks at the man and loved him. And the Greek uses the word agapao, which means the most intense, family-style love for another. Then Jesus challenges the man to give up everything and follow Him as Master and Teacher.
The happy ending would be that the man followed Jesus’s command, sold everything and became Christ’s thirteenth apostle. But, no, the ending was not that. And the Greek helps us understand. His face fell, using the words for the feeling experienced when a friend dies, and the same noun used for a terrible thunderstorm. He left, because he loved his “stuff” more than Our Lord.
Lent can be a time when we can look at our stuff and our habits and our pleasures and ask ourselves if any of that is more important than our following of Jesus Christ. We may not like the answer to that question, but it will give us a kind of center for our Lenten sacrifice, our Lenten reinvention of ourselves.
