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The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and
transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.
... Frederick Buechner (b. 1926), The Sacred Journey
(Open your mind and heart to the goodness of life this day.)
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NM 21:4-9; PS 102:2-3, 16-21; JN 8:21-30
R. O Lord, hear my prayer, and let my cry come to you.
O LORD, hear my prayer,
and let my cry come to you.
Hide not your face from me
in the day of
my distress.
Incline your ear to me;
in the day when I call, answer me speedily.
The nations shall revere your name, O LORD,
and all the kings of the earth your glory,
When the LORD has rebuilt Zion
and appeared in his glory;
When he has regarded the prayer of the destitute,
and not despised their prayer.
Let this be written for the
generation to come,
and let his future creatures praise the LORD:
"The LORD looked down from his holy height,
from heaven he beheld the earth,
To hear the groaning of the prisoners,
to release those doomed to die."
USCCB Lectionary
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Reflection on the Scriptures |
(Today's) readings
specifically explore the necessity of seeing and understanding both the nature and the power of our sin writ large ("lifted up"). Only then can we be healed from sin and its effects in our lives and our world. In the first reading we have the very vivid story of the people of the Exodus grumbling and complaining as they cross the desert. This behavior, which comes from the very people that God had rescued from horrific oppression in Egypt, under a Pharaoh who consumed their
lives to feed his false god persona, is grossly ungrateful. Not only had Yahweh rescued them from oppression, but he provided quail and manna to eat and a fresh stream of pure water (from a rock, no less) to drink. God is taking them to a land "flowing with milk and honey" where they will be His people, protected and loved. But they are a querulous bunch, who cannot see either the nature of their own dependence upon God, or the responsibility of gratitude. Their sin of
ingratitude is as twisting and venomous as a poison snake which kills with its bite, but it can't be recognized until it is lifted up on a pole and each person has to look at it and see his or her own darkness of heart to be "cured" of its effect.
The author of John's Gospel sees in the caduceus (serpent on a stick) of the Torah story a type or way of interpreting Jesus' crucifixion. When,
battered and bleeding, he is "lifted up" in front of us it is possible for all of us ungrateful idolaters to see, to know, to recognize, and to understand, through God's grace, the nature and cost of our sin for ourselves, our world and to our loving Lord. Jesus took our sin into his own human personhood in order to put it to death and be the instrument for our release from the sin that condemned him and all its death-dealing consequences.
- by Eileen Burke-Sullivan
Creighton Online Ministries
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Selected Quotes from St. John of the Cross on the Journey of the Soul to God by Contemplation - from Living Flame of
Love
Second Redaction
Stanza 1. #3. These acts of love of the soul are most precious, and even one of them is of greater merit and worth than all that the soul has done in its life apart from this transformation.
#8. These wounds, which are the
fires of God, are the sparks of these tender touches of flame which touch the soul intermittently and proceed from the fire of love, which is not idle, but whose flames strike and wound my soul in its deepest center.
- compiled by James and Tyra Arraj Paperback edition: Kindle edition available
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