27 February 2021
Saturday of the First Week of Lent
“Today you are making this agreement with the LORD: he is to be your God and you are to walk in his ways and observe his statutes, commandments and decrees, and to hearken to his voice.” (Deuteronomy 26:17)
We began this week considering how the desert is a place in which we see and embrace our own dependence on God and a place in which we meet Christ. It is the desert, that state in which we realize our dependence on God that helps us to call upon the Lord. And, as the Lord promises (Ps 91:15-16) when we call upon Him, He answers us. Now we hear that the communication with the Lord goes both ways! God also calls upon us, invites us to be ready to hear and listen to Him as He is ready to hear and listen to us; to act upon His invitation as He so kindly acts when we pray.
We may well be struck by the invitation, the commandment which we hear: “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mt 5:48) Perfection sounds rather inhuman to many today. What does Jesus teach us about the Father that would show us what perfection is? “He makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” (Mt 5:45) The perfection of the human person, reaching our goal is to love in concrete actions, doing what is truly good for our brothers and sisters, not holding back because of pride, fear, wrath, or anything else that would prevent us from treating others with the love with which God treats us and them. We may indeed encounter those who do not love us back (at least at first), and yet then is when we are to follow St. John of the Cross’ advice on being like Jesus: “Put love where you do not find love, and then you will find love there.”
Christ loves us. Christ has entered into our desert, to be hungry and tired with us, to walk with us the way that is difficult but so needed: loving where there is not yet love. Dare we follow the Lord in the desert, where we will depend completely on him, where we will see our own shortcomings, where we will be called to see more deeply than the shortcomings level of our neighbor, where we finally attend to Christ’s gaze upon us and our neighbors, and hear what the eternal Son of the eternal Father says about us: that, by His Spirit, Christ is making us to be like Him, to be truly sons and daughters of God? He thinks the desert is worth entering so as to embrace us and change our minds, let us pray for the grace to continue to meet Him in the desert and there to be changed by Him.