Getting Ready to Pray                     

We are invited to pray to the God of peace with the joy that comes through our being reconciled with God through Jesus Christ. We pray with a new notion of a God of peace, whose constant labor is for our ongoing creation, resulting in peaceful union.

We are bidden also to pray with our eagerness to celebrate the realities of Easter. There is the old Latin phrase, festina lente, “Hasten, slowly.” We can pray with patience and to linger with these days of waking up to who God says we are in our Baptisms.

We may reflect as well on our need for a Savior, a Jesus to free us. We can pray as well for a deeper sense of the areas of our lives which are not quite living yet.

Some Thoughts 

Last Christmas we celebrated the Word of God as taking flesh in the body of a simple, very human Nazareth girl. The Holy Infinite was come to begin the construction of the world as God’s Kingdom.

This great Christian theme embraces all three readings of today’s liturgy. The Second Reading from Ephesians, which needs no commentary or reflection by me, must be read slowly in our gatherings. It is loaded with basic theologically important, yet simple statements. It will be easy to miss after listening to the drama of the First Reading. If it is read un-slowly at your parish, stand up and say, “what was that?”

Jeremiah and other prophets had come as messengers to recall Israel to its dignity, but as we hear in this section, from the last chapter of the Book of Second Chronicles, these messengers were mocked, scorned and rebuked. The religious leaders and the people rebelled and polluted the very holy Temple. For this hardness of heart, they are invaded and brought into captivity.

Jesus continues his little talk with Nicodemus who has come during the dark of night to hear from Jesus about eternal life, and even more, just about Jesus. Nicodemus gets quite a lengthy earful in today’s Gospel reading.

He first asks his listener to recall how Moses, the great Jewish leader saved his people by raising the image of a serpent and all who looked upon it were healed. Using this historical reference, Jesus indicates that he, too, will be lifted up (on the cross) to heal all those who look upon him with the eyes of faith. This seeing/believing in him who has been sent, will lead to eternal life. God has sent the Son for the very purpose of building a “home” wherein God will be with them. Recall the last verse of our First Reading. Jesus has come to be the New Temple and remain with us.

I embarrassedly remember a certain seven-year-old lad who snatched an orange at his local grocery store, put it in his left hand, tucked it behind his back and walked slinkingly toward the in-door. It is very difficult to open the in-door when one hand is occupied in the deed of darkness.

The owner came and asked kindly why I, that seven-year-old lad, wasn’t going out the out-door, which he knew would involve going through the check-out line. He saw what I was trying to do and he told me it was easier to open with two hands. I told him I would go out through the other door and so, slinkingly, I walked back past the oranges and slyly deposited the fatal fruit back in its box. Obviously I assumed the owner didn’t see me do that.

It is a gracious comfort to know, that like Nicodemus, we can come to Jesus out of our darkness, and because he is the Light of Love, we can look upon him lifted up on the cross and walk out of the darkness into the light of our streets.

Recently, our little house here in north Omaha was invaded by mice! Yup, when we took the container of dog food up from the basement, the mice, who had been cheating the dog a little bit, bravely followed the nourishing bag. 

Our Lenten reflection sponsored by the mice is that getting to the roots, the source, the nourishing bag, down deep in our personal basements will eventually result in getting rid of our personal spiritual mice which do cause us ultimate discomfort and messes all around. Prophets like Jeremiah and Jesus himself are not setting traps in our readings today, but are offering freedom from the darkness of our basements.

Whoever lives the truth comes to the light,
so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.
(John 3:21)