A Reflection for Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent
Find today’s readings here.
How is God constantly transforming the world? This question runs through all of today’s readings; each text is a signpost pointing us in a direction that prepares us for the next.
Our first stop is with the prophet Isaiah, and his gaze is fixed on what is to come. God’s intervention is “about to” happen, and this vision takes in the entire cosmos. Isaiah’s “new heavens and new earth” transcend all we can know, and we sense there is no way a human timeline can be applied to it. The prophet tells us what this transformation will be like. It requires we let go of the past and what is painful there, because when God creates, it is for “joy” and “delight.” Woven inside the poetry, Isaiah gives us a glimpse of his community’s painful reality. There is much crying and weeping because life is fragile, and people are dying before their time. People have no homes, and they are hungry. This was happening then, and it is happening now. In Isaiah’s lifetime and our own, God’s vision invites us into fullness and abundance for the whole of reality. God sees our pain and hears our cries. Maybe we need to call out to God more often and amplify the cries of those around us. When we join in God’s vision, we can be part of the transformation.
Our second stop is Psalm 30, and this feels more personal. Where Isaiah reflects on the whole community, indeed on the whole heavens and earth, Psalm 30 can feel like someone looking in a mirror and being moved to thank God at the sight of their own face. In Spanish, we have a short exclamation: “¡Naciste!” It literally means “you were just born!” and it is said when someone narrowly avoids a calamity: when a car speeds by just moments after you crossed the street, or when you almost fall down the stairs and someone reaches out and catches you. The phrase combines the sense of fragility of being alive with the gratitude of being able to live for just a little longer. The psalmist seems to have had one of those experiences when death seemed very near but somehow, they were spared. God does not wait for a far-off future to act, but God acts presently in each of our lives, rescuing and changing our “mourning into dancing.” God is there all the time, revealing God’s care even in the smallest moments of our lives. Maybe we need to pay attention to every rebirth we experience and listen for every moment when things could have gone very wrong but we survived. In Spanish, we also respond to greetings that ask us how we are with “Bien, gracias a Dios.” Maybe we need to thank God more often as we look ourselves in the eye and notice the fragility and wonder of our lives.
Our final stop is the Gospel of John, as the one who comes to transform everything in reality joins us on earth. God has now entered time, entered the earthiness and contingency of human existence, and is experiencing firsthand the hard work of transformation. Jesus has to put up with the people in his hometown who can spurn him at one moment and then call for his help the next. He can see how they rejoice when he brings good wine, but is that the only reason they care for him? Our reality needs transforming from the ground up, we need to be new beings who recognize God’s abundance, not just wish for particular things for ourselves.
In the ministry of Jesus, the transcendent grandeur of the cosmos breaks into reality in the very particular: healing, feeding, forgiving. Even more, Jesus challenges us to take hold of the larger vision, the one that doesn’t need “signs and wonders” but rather feels God’s very nearness in everything. Jesus is the ultimate bridge between a universe being transformed and the beings that need to be part of that transformation. God is at work in the person of Jesus and needs us to look up and out from ourselves, and feel the force of just that one phrase: “You may go; your son will live.” God speaks reality as abundant life into being from our tiny human selves to the galaxies swirling about us, and at such moments, we just need to gratefully surrender to the sacred awesomeness of it all.
