4th Sunday of Lent: Cycle C 21-22
FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT
Joshua 5:9a, 10-12 | 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 | Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
Oh God, who through your word reconcile the human race to yourself in a wonderful way, grant, we pray, that with prompt devotion and eager faith the Christian people may hasten toward the solemn celebrations to come. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.
I want to begin my reflections on the image in the first reading. The story is about the role of a prophet and the role of a king. In the Old Testament it’s clear that God did not speak to everyone directly but only to a few, and the prophets were the people considered to be those who were able to listen directly to God’s direction and God’s guidance. And then there were the kings, who were the basic rulers of the people. They were the ones who had power over people. So the history of kings is not exactly successful in terms of being in sync with what the prophets had been given to show them how they should be a leader and what they should do, and it’s clear that there was this tension between the two, because somehow the prophet, who was then able to have a direct connection with God — they were mystics in that sense. When they demanded that the powerful kings had to make sure that they were keeping in line with the teaching of the Torah, they resisted, and there’s something about being in a position of power. I think we all know that there’s a kind of inflation that comes into that role. You’re the one with the power. You’re the one with the authority, and you start acting autonomously out of your own needs. Unfortunately, when you go to a kind of unredeemed core of a human being, back then, throughout the Old Testament, human beings were basically self-centered creatures. They hadn’t evolved very much, but there came a moment in history that this New Testament inaugurated, and it changed everything.
And so I’m hoping you can see in this story of what it is that made that change possible, and what it is, is an action on the part of God, not an action on the part of human beings but an action on the part of God to decide that all of you, all of us are prophets. He said, “I will come and speak to each of you in your hearts.” It was talked about in the Old Testament. Jeremiah said that there would be a time coming in the future where God would enter into everyone’s heart. He would write his law there. The things he wanted people to be that were having to be told to people from an outside authority, they were going to be inside the human being, living in his heart. We would know what is true. We would know what is right. We wouldn’t have to be taught and told what to do. We just needed to be awakened to that realization that God then placed in our hearts. It’s the new covenant, the new law described as love.
So you can see in that Old Testament image of two powers, the authority of the king and the authority of the prophet, those two live inside of you and me. Our heart is filled with an awareness of what is true and what is real, who we are, why we’re here, who God is, but our minds, our minds can act independently of the heart. And when you look at the way the brain works compared to the heart, the heart is based in mercy, compassion, intuition, mystery, but the mind is pretty practical and usually has a drive inside of it to achieve a goal. And it will use the most logical ways of accomplishing that goal. There will be the ways of logic. There will be whatever works. If it works, it doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong. Then it’s going to be chosen if the focus is primarily on achieving the goal of the mind, and that’s what Jesus had to come to change. The only control over the mind in the Old Testament, the control the prophets had, in a sense, to anyone who was not following the rules and regulations of the Torah, was punishment. So there it is. If you punish the one who is achieving a goal in the wrong way, they may listen and say, “Well, I’m not gaining what I hoped I would gain. I’m not getting what I wanted.” So the punishment overrides the benefits. So they find themselves changing, but that never really did much to change who the person is.
And so we have in this story, a beautiful story about the way God works in the world today, is that he’s not interested in looking at your sins and judging them and punishing you, because it didn’t work. It doesn’t work. He had to do something much more mysterious and much more of a — much greater a gift. Rather than using the fear of punishment as a way of changing behavior, he said, “No, I will place in your heart what is true and what is real. The behavior that really produces life for you, I’ll place that in you. You’ll know it in your heart, and the only thing you have to do in order to be in touch with that is allow me to do something for you. Allow me to do something.” What is it? Enlightenment. “Let me show you the impact of a lie that you might be living out in your waking life, in your head. I will show you that the lie doesn’t do what it promises. It can’t produce that. So if you’ll let me show you — just let me open your eyes. That’s all I want to do so you can see it for what it is.” And there’s resistance to that.
It seems the more authority a person feels they have in the way their life goes, the harder it is for them to hear that they are not the one that is making it all happen. They’re not the power source they thought they were. There is something so difficult about a person in authority to accept the fact that they’ve been wrong. We see it in our own egos, but we also see it so much in a political leader, in a person that has tremendous influence and power in a company. We see it in religious leaders. When you have this authority, you’re given some kind of sense that you’re better than or more important than others, but you get — entitlement comes in, and isn’t it interesting to see that political systems that are unhealthy or a religious way of treating members in the church that isn’t filled with compassion but rather with judgment and condemnation, all those things are so clearly evident in our culture. We look around us. Yes, it is really hard for people who have a sense of their own importance and a sense of their privileged place, where they can make decisions about things without any responsibility to how they affect people — that kind of thing is absolutely there. And you know what? Every time you see it exposed and you see it collapse, there’s a light that comes on. That’s what, I think, that second reading is saying, that every time the thing that is dark and hidden and insidiously damaging to people, once it’s exposed, it becomes a light to everyone. It’s like we all realize what potential is in an ego that is self-centered, an institution that works only for itself, any kind of position that one takes when it’s so clear that they have no compassion or empathy. What a horrible thing, when you think about it, to live as a human being in the world, to get the things you want without any consideration of how it affects people. We call that a sociopath. It’s interesting to me that there are such creatures in the world, and you wonder, “What are they there for? Why does God allow people to come in and literally—” They’ve looked at their brains, and they find out, hey, there’s something in this person’s brain that they don’t have any sense of compassion or empathy or any realization of what their choices are doing to people that are deeply harmed by them. They have no sense of that. So it just reminds me that, if that sense is sometimes not there, it could be there in lesser forms, and it is in people that are just blinded by something. Maybe it’s trauma. Maybe it’s something that happened to them.
But here’s the key, the seed: to begin to see like that blind man in the story was touched by this God, who once he saw, once he saw his blindness, the man realized there was something that — well, it wasn’t necessarily that he so much understood that his blindness was there. He obviously knew he couldn’t see, but it’s so interesting to me. The action of Jesus to that man was to do nothing other than to want him initially to see and to do something that gained his sight for him. He didn’t look at the man and say — let’s say he didn’t use blindness but something in his control. He wasn’t asking somebody who was in control of changing to change. You’ve got somebody who wasn’t in control of the situation he was in, and he changed him. That’s the mystery. God does not look at you and say, “Stop sinning. Wake up. Look at it. Do that work, and then come back to me.” No, he said, “Just wait. Just believe a little bit, a little bit. Believe I can change that. I can open your eyes. All you’ve got to do is say, ‘Yes, I would like to see.’” A blind man must want to see. He had that desire. Then the blindness of the mind and the blindness of the will — there’s something in us that doesn’t want to see, because we don’t want to lose the power. But just as God entered into a blind man who couldn’t fix himself, he’s entering into you and me, and we really don’t on our own have the ability to fix ourselves. All he wants is a, “Yes, I see. In this area, I think I really am blind, but show me what I don’t see. Show me.” And he will show you, and he won’t condemn you for what you reveal to him. He won’t turn against you in any way, shape or form, because his only intention is love, and love is light, and light is life.
Father, you revealed your heart in the person of Jesus. Your heart is not filled with judgment or condemnation but a deep, deep longing to open our eyes so we can see the beauty of the life you’ve created for us and turn away from the things that rob us and rob others of that life. Open us to this gift. Give us the courage to say yes to your working in us, opening our eyes gently, sometimes not so gently maybe, but the core is that you are the one who saves us. We can’t save ourselves. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.