Friday - Fifth Week in Lent
The language of discord and conflict pervades our current social landscape, and the Scripture readings appointed for today seem to echo these themes. All of the principal actors — the Psalmist, the prophet Jeremiah, and Jesus — are set in circumstances fraught with danger and opposition. The dangerous opposition is from within their own societies, from their own compatriots. Their brothers and sisters act wrong-headedly and they are seemingly incapable of understanding the error of their thinking. And what’s more, they become increasingly angry in their ignorance about the truth of the matter – even to the point of violence. The parallels are eerily all too familiar.
What should we make of these ominous narratives for our own time? Like the Psalmist, on most days most of us would rather escape our current reality for a remoted hiding place – the psalmist uses the word crag, an outcropping of rocks in the mountains that makes it possible to cover ourselves from view.
Of course, escape is seldom a real option for us. Most of us have responsibilities to bear – family, work, school, commitments to others – that preclude any such easy out. Even so, perhaps we need to remind ourselves of our own high calling: to be agents of transformation wherever we find ourselves, through the love of God in Jesus Christ. Again and again, we must hear God’s call and respond to it, whether the circumstances seem easy or hard. God expects of us that we would be the strength to pick someone up that we see falling. We must be a haven for those in need of rest. We must be a stronghold for those in need of protection. All of this because we are the presence of Christ – the presence of God – in our world.
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