Daily Scripture

Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent

Scripture:

Daniel 3:25, 34-43
Matthew 18:21-35

Reflection:

As an urgent care physician, most of my days at work are filled with common maladies such as sore throats and sprains, cuts and coughs.  Occasionally, either due to denial or desperation, a more serious situation will present itself.  Such was the case recently when a man arrived at our center, severely short of breath.  He was brusque with the staff and greeted me with an obvious air of suspicion.  As his story was unfolded to me…60 pack-years of smoking, no regular or routine health care, it would have been easy to detach myself and judge his condition as self-inflicted.

As we continued our discourse, his anger began to give way to the fear that was driving it, and soon he was pleading with me.  "Please give me something to make me better.  I can’t climb the stairs to my apartment without stopping many times along the way.  I can’t sleep because I wake up choking.  I can’t work because I don’t have the strength or breath for the two-mile walk to get there."  Eventually, his words turned to sobs as his wife sat silently nearby.

After some testing, an x-ray, and treatments given to make him more comfortable, we gathered again in the tiny room to face the fact now revealed…a large tumor occupying his right lung.  This vulnerable soul at the foot of the cross.

I had been pondering our readings for today for some time prior to meeting this patient.  Both readings detail accounts of individuals, like my patient, in desperate situations.

In the reading from Daniel, we hear the prayer of Azariah (Abednego) as he, Shadrach and Meschach are pleading for their lives as the fiery furnace is being stoked.  Our reading today from Matthew’s Gospel is the final section of a larger discourse that is often called the "church order" discourse or the "Discourse on Community".  It includes the Parable of the Lost Sheep, in addition to today’s Parable of the Unforgiving Servant.  In the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, we hear the pleading words of the servant as he falls down in homage before his master.  In each of these readings, the ultimate call is to reconciliation, right relationship.

The Proto-Indo-European origins of the word, plea, bear the meaning to smooth out or to make flat.  Similarly, the Middle English roots of the word, reconcile, mean to make good again, to reconsecrate.

Most of us do not pass the day without an awareness of the spoken and unspoken pleading voices in our world, in our communities, in our own families.  How do they transform us?  How do we reconcile? 

The Holocaust museum web site has a banner that provides one answer to such questions.  It reads, "Never again.  What you do matters."

 

Dr. Capper Rademaker is a longtime friend and partner of the Passionists in Louisville, Kentucky.

Monday of the Third Week of Lent 

Scripture:

2 Kings 5:1-15
Psalm 42
Luke 4:24-30

 

 

Reflection:

Lent:  Fasting from Anger, Feasting on Patience

In today’s Gospel selection, Jesus was rejected by the people of his home town of Nazareth because he was too familiar to them, his words too challenging, and even his family background too simple.  He was "taken for granted".  The people rose up against him in anger and wanted to throw him over the hill of the town.  Jesus patiently moved through their midst, and went away.

In the reading from 2^nd Kings, Elisha’s directions to Naaman for the cure of his leprosy were at first shrugged off because they seemed too simple and commonplace.  "Go and wash seven times in the Jordan…"  Naaman went away angry – until others patiently reasoned with him…and he was cured.

Both scriptures speak of anger in the hearts of people, and the destructive force it carries.  The word itself has roots that connote choking and strangulation.  No doubt, anger "chokes" our personal growth, our relationships; it is destructive on many levels!  In our anger, we lose perspective on life and close ourselves inward.  We need the grace to change and grow.

This Lent, we’re encouraged to have a change of heart.  As we become more aware of our gifts as members of God’s family, God offers us the grace to change:  to move away from the anger that may try to "strangle" us, to a renewed patience that helps us see every person, every event in life as part of God’s Plan for us and our world.  To move from anger to patience:  a challenge!  So necessary!

Let’s not forget:  With God all things are possible.  Let’s be open to the graces of Lent, and be renewed on every level of life. 

 

Fr. John Schork, C.P. is the local leader of the Passionist community in Louisville, Kentucky. 

Saturday of the Second Week of Lent

Scripture:

Micah 7:14-15, 18-20
Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

Reflection:

The first reading, from the prophet Micah, is his reminder to Judah that God will be faithful to the covenant made between God and Abraham, and renewed in God’s faithfulness to Isaac and Jacob.  This covenant includes the promise of forgiveness from the sins committed in Micah’s generation, when the abuse of money and riches led to a corruption of ritual and honesty among the Judean inhabitants around Jerusalem.

And then comes the Gospel, with Luke’s richly dramatized account of the "prodigal son".  There is probably no more easily recognized story from the New Testament, if we put the Infancy Narratives and the Passion accounts in a separate ranking.  Now, during the Lenten season, when parishes hold their accustomed "Penance Services", this is the scripture reading that is most likely to be chosen for reading to the assembly.

It is a story that highlights the foolishness of sin, more than the evil intent that also stirs the heart to sin.  In this account, the second son is presented as a foolish adolescent who has big dreams of making it in the world.  He is a self-centered and impatient young man who fails to appreciate how much he has benefited from his father’s largesse. 

When the world of his dreams, which he thought would spring into being by his foolish spending on luxuries and loose-living, comes crashing down around him, he collapses into a confrontation with his own self.  He starts talking to himself, he tells himself what anyone could have told him when he embarked on his spending binge.  Coming to his senses he thought,‘How many of my father’s hired workers have more than enough food to eat, but here am I, dying from hunger.’

"Coming to his senses."  He was acting foolishly, but he realized that by acknowledging his foolishness, he could get back the roof over his head at his father’s house, even though he would not ask for anything more than to be considered one of the servants. 

So he got up and went back to his father. While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion.

The narrative now takes a different tack.  We have followed the fate of the second son.  He has rehearsed his petition for pardon from his father.  But now the father steps to the fore.  He was filled with compassion.  

Because of that compassion, even the "bargain" rehearsed by the son, Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son;treat me as you would treat one of your hired workers, does not get uttered….His father cuts him off in mid-sentence.  His father changes the tone of the encounter.  Take the fattened calf and slaughter it. Then let us celebrate with a feast, because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again;he was lost, and has been found.

So often when we re-read this beautiful story of compassion, we hear the events re-told.  Think for a minute of the words the son and his father exchange:  "Father, I have sinned…." and "this son of mine was dead…."  The son would have accepted to be let back under his father’s roof as a servant, but the father’s love for his son is not to be bartered for a relationship based on a penitent remorse.  The father cannot not love his son. 

This is the exact opposite of the older son’s attitude toward both his father and his brother.  The older son, called one of the servants and asked what this might mean. The servant said to him,‘Your brother has returned and your father has slaughtered the fattened calf…’.

Even the servants can see the overflow of love between father and second son.  It is the very thing that drives the older brother to protest: Look, all these years I served you, and not once did I disobey your orders;yet you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends. But when your son returns who swallowed up your property with prostitutes, for him you slaughter the fattened calf.

Curiously, it was the second son who thought he could win his father’s love by asking to be treated only like a servant.  But it is the older son who actually makes the comparison in his cause: "all these years I served you, and not once did I disobey your orders…."  He has been as good a servant as possible.  And he also wanted to be rewarded for this servant’s loyalty, "a young goat to feast on with my friends."

Even more tellingly, when this older son tries to plead his cause, he can’t even bring himself to acknowledge his father and brother as such.  His choice of words says so much: "But when your son returns…."  He can’t can even say "my brother".

It is a true story of God’s love for us and a model of what our love should be for God.  It is a relationship rooted on God’s parental love and our filial response.  However, it also means that we are brothers and sisters to one another.  Without that relationship with one another, we harbor a selfishness and a pettiness that will keep us from appreciating the gift of compassion that God shares with all of us here on God’s earth.

 

Fr. Arthur Carrillo, C.P.  is the director of the Missions for Holy Cross Province.  He lives in Chicago, Illinois. 

Scripture:

Genesis 37:3-4, 12-13a, 17b-28a
Psalm 105:16-17, 18-19, 20-21
Matthew 21:33-43, 45-46  

Reflection:

The readings of today are all closely linked.  Their purpose is to strengthen our faith in God’s complete love for us in spite of the sufferings and despair we may undergo.  In fact, they prompt us to see that these very sufferings are a sign of that love – that through them we can become one with Christ and so enter with him into everlasting glory.

We begin with the very human story of Joseph, the youngest and most favored son of Israel (Jacob).  That very favor, shown so extravagantly and imprudently by his father, prompted all his brothers to turn against him.  In fact they came to hate him and waited for a chance to kill him.  When that chance came, they hesitated to spill his blood.  Instead they sold him to travelling merchants who will sell him again in Egypt.

The responsorial psalm continues the story.  Praising the hidden workings of God, it reminds us of the calamities that Joseph bore in his days in Egypt.  In chains as a slave, he was thrown a number of times into the royal prison. But clinging faithfully and openly to his God, he was able by his gifts of prophecy to find favor with the Pharaoh himself. He became the savior of his brothers and his father, and of his people Israel.  For this God had let him be dragged down into Egypt: "Remember the marvels the Lord has done!"

In the gospel we leave Joseph, the symbol and pre-figure of Christ the Messiah, for the actual person of Jesus himself.  Jesus, surrounded by his enemies as well as his disciples, tells them a parable.  Starting with the image of the winepress taken from Isaiah, clearly and pointedly, Jesus makes it a parable about his own life.  It is the story of the patient, loving mercy and goodness of the landowner abused by the base ingratitude, greed, and cruelty of his tenants.  It ends in the tenants’ violent murder of the owner’s son, drawing down a terrible vengeance upon the tenants themselves.  Quoting from Psalm 118, a psalm of praise for the great wonders done by God, Jesus makes clear his meaning: – He is the rejected stone who, in spite of all his sufferings, and by this very rejection, will become the cornerstone of the Kingdom of God. 

In the gospel Jesus himself is telling us that the terrible passion and death he is about to enter is indeed terrible – it is indeed real.  But it is not the end: through this self-surrender he will enable his Father to raise him up to everlasting glory – and to raise us with him.  Contemplating Jesus’ own life and death in the story of the winepress, let us try to join our own difficulties, hardships and sufferings with his.  May the Holy Spirit deepen our faith and trust in the unfailing love of God for us, who "so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son; so that everyone who believes in him might have eternal life." 

 

Br. Peter A. Fitzpatrick, CFX, a Xaverian Brother, is a Passionist Associate at Ryken House, across the creek from the Passionist Monastery, in Louisville, Kentucky.

 

Thursday of the Second Week of Lent

Scripture:

Jeremiah 17:5-10
Luke 16:19-31

Reflection:

This gospel story of Lazarus and the rich man is so familiar to us that we could be tempted to miss the message.  Here are a few details from the reading that we might think about.  First, notice that the rich man does not have a name while Lazarus does.  Not having a name can mean many things – lack of influence, diminished power, no lasting legacy and on and on.  But it might also mean that the rich man becomes a bit like "every man" – that is that most of us could possibly identify with the rich man.  Then consider that the rich man is not described as cruel or mean.  We do not know that he makes a conscious decision to allow Lazarus to go hungry.  Perhaps his sin is a sin of omission.  Maybe he is so consumed with his luxurious clothes and fine dining, he does not even see the suffering of Lazarus.  It seems as though, the rich man is possibly what we consider a fairly good guy – after all, even in the depth of his suffering he thinks of his brothers. 

When we consider these things, perhaps we will identify more with the story. Of course most of us would never consciously decide to allow someone to go hungry or suffer great indignities, and yet, while we know that many in our world die every day from hunger, many go without the medical care needed to save their lives, many live in squalor and many don’t even have clean water to drink, we take no action.  In fact, most of us don’t want to even think about, let alone see the "Lazaruses" in our world.  We continue to consume without thinking of what our consumption does to those who suffer in developing countries.  In fact we avoid seeing or thinking about those who are in need in our own community, at our very doors.

During this Lenten Season, one of our resolutions might be to open our eyes and see those who suffer, and think about those who would welcome the very crumbs from our table.  Perhaps then we will really understand Jesus’ message in today’s Gospel.  And when we come to the end of our days, we can say to God that we heard the messages of the Gospel and changed our ways.

‘If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be persuaded
if someone should rise from the dead.’"

 

Mary Lou Butler is a long-time friend and partner in ministry to the Passionists in California.

Wednesday of the Second Week of Lent

Scripture:

Jeremiah 18:18-20
Matthew 20:17-28

Reflection:

When I was a kid in Chicago, my Dad had a humus pile in the back yard – long before composting was popular. We would throw coffee grounds and grass clippings, egg shells and potato peelings on top of the dirt, and Dad would keep turning it over, producing the richest, blackest soil you can imagine. The word "humility" comes from that same origin, humus, and it means earth. Out of the woundedness and brokenness of our earthly lives come the fertile signs of spiritual growth… our call to humility.

Each time we begin the forty days of Lent, we are reminded that "we are dust, and unto dust we shall all return." But like the fallen angels or Adam and Eve, we often rebel. We don’t like to be reminded that we come from the earth.  I am told that 75% of the American population does not accept the evidence of evolution. By that I mean something far more significant than that you and I share common ancestry with today’s monkeys! It has to do with our world view.  We are reminded that the human species wasn’t inserted by God on to this planet in some dramatic and triumphant way. Rather, we came from the earth, or, as the Book of Genesis tells us, out of clay we were formed. Therefore, planet earth is not something we are to dominate, to use and abuse. We are the planet earth, we came from it…

Today’s Gospel says it powerfully: if we wish to be great, we must be the servant of all. That’s humility. And slowly, perhaps, we are evolving into understanding this virtue of humility.

Another metaphor from Sacred Scripture tells us that Adam and Eve were told to stay away from tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Perhaps God knew how tempting the sin of pride would be for our human race. When we begin to dictate to creation what is good and evil, black and white, we begin to form dualisms. And those black and white categories become boundary lines, and soon boundary lines become battle lines. It is clear from the world of politics and church and family systems today how destructive these battle lines can be. The curse of our age is fundamentalism; the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, black and white. We grow more polarized and divided as the days unfold, and we spend more energy entrenching ourselves into our ideologies than building the Kingdom of God.

Maybe I need to get some rich, black soil under my fingernails, and spend some time in the garden. Humus.

 

Fr. Jack Conley, C.P. is the director of the Office of Mission Effectiveness.  He is a member of the Passionist formation community at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent

Scripture:

Isaiah 1:10, 16-20
Matthew 23:1-12

Reflection:

In two days’ time the Catholic Church will begin a journey at once familiar and uncharted.  Pope Benedict XVI will lay down his ministry as Bishop of Rome and leader of the universal church, and entrust the work of selecting a successor to the Holy Spirit working through the collective wisdom of 116 elector cardinals.  Not that having a new pope is a new experience for most of us-this will be my seventh.  But the election of a new pope while his predecessor is still living is new for us all and is giving those fascinated by Vatican protocols lots to brood over.

Reactions to Pope Benedict’s decision range from the incredulous "Pope’s don’t resign, they die," to the humorous like the cartoon that depicts a Vatican official asking the Pope, "You’re giving up WHAT for Lent?"  But most have used words that echo throughout today’s readings: humility, courage, service, and love.  Being pope is never about being pope, but about always pointing us to God and encouraging us to live a life infused with the love of Christ.

Lent seems to be a most natural time for this unprecedented handing on of the role and responsibilities of being the Servant of the Servants of God.  In today’s gospel reading from Matthew, Jesus extols his friends, "The greatest among you must be your servant.  Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted."  The papal ministry is not about the person who is pope but the ministry of being our universal pastor, the one who loves and cares for us all, but most of all those unloved, unwanted, poor, hungry and abandoned.

One of those who will gather in March to elect a successor to Benedict XVI is the Cardinal Archbishop of Manila (Philippines), Luis Antonio Tagle.  Reflecting the straight talk of Jesus in today’s Gospel, Cardinal "Chito," as he called in his homeland, once told an audience, "Like those who opposed Jesus in the name of authentic religion, we could be blind to God and neighbors because of self-righteousness, spiritual pride and rigidity of mind."  He went on to say, "[Church] customs and persons, when naively and narrowly deified and glorified, might become hindrances to true worship and compassion."

As the wheels of change gain speed in the weeks ahead, those given the enormous responsibility of electing a new pope will exercise their role in the midst of Lent when, as Isaiah the Prophet says in today’s first reading, we are all to hear again God’s word:  "Wash yourselves clean! Put away your misdeeds from before my eyes; cease doing evil; learn to do good. Make justice your aim: redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow." 

 

Robert Hotz is a consultant with American City Bureau, Inc. and is the Director of The Passion of Christ: The Love That Compels Campaign for Holy Cross Province.

Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, Apostle

Scripture:

1 Peter 5:1-4
Matthew 16:13-19

Reflection:

He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?"  Matthew 16:15

I was raised in the Church, and loved going, but I was very uncomfortable saying the name of Jesus. It all changed when I surrendered my life to the Lord when I was 25 years old; when I asked the Holy Spirit to teach me and guide me and reveal Jesus to me. Since that time, I am now comfortable not only saying "Jesus", but wanting to share His awesome love with others. Now my answer to the question above isn’t just a list of catechism answers stored in my head, but comes from experiences of the heart – it’s more like a prayer thanking Jesus for revealing Himself to me in so many ways:

You are Jesus, my Savior, my brother, my friend. You are the long-awaited Messiah, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. You are the Lamb who was slain. You paid my debt by dying on a cross so that I could go to heaven someday! You are the Way, the Truth and the Life. You show me how to live here on earth, and you show me the way home to the Father. You are my hiding place, my shield and my fortress. You are the lifter of my head. You breathe life into me every morning and walk with me through the day. You call me to follow you and to learn from you. You give me your sweet Holy Spirit. You are my hope, my song and my peace. You are the bright morning star. You are the same yesterday, today and forever. You are the Alpha and the Omega. You are the King of kings and the Lord of lords! You alone are worthy of my praise. You are the Bread of life, and I am privileged to receive you every day in communion. You are the Word made flesh. And as today’s 1^st reading and responsorial psalm remind us, you are the Good Shepherd. When I get lost you come to find me and you don’t scold me all the way home, but you carry me on your shoulders and remind me that you love me. Thank you Lord for being such an awesome God! And thanks too that there is always more of You to discover.

Now it’s your turn… Jesus is asking you, "Who do you say that I am?"

 

Janice Carleton and her husband Jim live in Portland, OR and partner with Passionist Fr. Cedric Pisegna in Fr. Cedric Ministries. Janice also leads women’s retreats. She is the mother of 4 grown children and grandmother of 6. Visit Janice’s website at http://www.jcarleton.com/ or email her at [email protected].