Weekly Reflection 022408AD

February 24, 2008AD

Third Sunday of Lent

Do We Listen and Not Hear?

Daily, Catholics begin Morning Prayer (aka Lauds) with Psalm 95, our responsorial psalm today. In Latin, it is called the Venite, Exultemus (Come, let us acclaim the Lord).

Psalm 95 begins by acknowledging the Creator as responsible for all that is. In primitive language, we hear, “YHWH is the great God, the great king over all the gods…He is our God, Whose people we are, the flock God tends.” These folks had a primitive worldview, but they had the knack of expressing things in clear language. The second part of the Psalm speaks of our duty as God’s people, the flock God tends. “Do not harden your hearts, as your ancestors.”

God’s Centrality makes our commitment to the Ten Commandments not just lip service. Fr Jim Keenan, a NY Jesuit, tells us that the first three commandments acknowledge our responsibilities to God as the Center of our lives. However, the last seven commandments speak of the implications of divine Centrality for us in our dealings with our sisters and brothers, who are God’s daughters and sons. God challenges us to respect our heritage (4^th), the dignity of human life (5^th), the dignity of commitment in marriage and all relationships (6th) , the importance of respect the property of others (7^th) and the importance of integrity in our words and actions (8^th). The last two expect that we ask ourselves if our deepest heart wishes about other people and their “stuff” (9^th & 10^th) are a re-iteration of the first commandment, viz., do our heart wishes correspond with the Centrality of God in our lives? If God is not the Center, dysfunction and sin result.

Psalm 95 and the Ten Commandments remind us that biblical religion is a religion of ethical monotheism. So what if we say that God is the center of our lives and then disregard God’s caveats to us regarding our lives with one another? As Jesus says at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father.”

In earlier times, on this Lenten Sunday, our Christian ancestors heard the Gospel of the Samaritan Woman, as we do today. They grasped her significance immediately. They were preparing for Easter with an honest self-critique of their response to Jesus. In addition, other adults were preparing for baptism on Easter Sunday. (Recall that baptism until the days of St Augustine was normally an adult decision.) During the 40 days of Lent, adult neophytes (called catechumens) prepared intensely for their baptism. They, too, did an adult self-analysis of where their life’s journey had brought them thus far. They saw more clearly, perhaps, that they were works in progress, masses of contradiction, sinful converts and/or converted sinners. After their baptism and confirmation, their task was to go out and bring other adults to faith in Christ Jesus. (This is given as one of the reasons why Christianity grew in such leaps and bounds.)

The Hebrew prophets saw the treatment of biblical triad of the widow, the orphan and the alien as the acid test of the authenticity of biblical religion. Jesus, our Prophet par excellence, sums up His last parable in St Matthew’s Gospel, “Whatever you did (or did not do) for the least of the brothers and sisters, you did (or did not do) for me.” Both baptized and soon to be baptized Christians honestly tried to answer.

This week witnessed the death of Fr Walter Burkhardt, SJ, from NYC at the grand age of 93. Back in 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon, Father Burghardt commented as an USA Catholic. He said he was excited by “man’s (sic) thrust into space but was concerned about our priorities.” “I simply do not believe that a program comparable to the moon landing cannot be projected around poverty, the (Vietnam) war, crime and so on. So when the first man walks on the moon, my joy will be tempered by sadness. For I shall be thinking of men who still walk this earth.”

Psalm 95 and the archetypal story of the Samaritan woman’s encounter with Jesus by the well challenge us to anticipate how we as individuals and as groups (both church and state) respond to the call of Psalm 95 and the judgment of the Great King and the self-assessment of the Samaritan woman at the well. The basic question might be, “Was what you did fair to the least of the sisters and brothers, the widow, the orphan, the alien?” Is it? jfq 022408AD