24 March 2023
Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent
To confront the holiness of God necessarily forces us to confront our own sinfulness and un-likeness to God. The saints know this: when we are face-to-face with the fount of all being, all goodness, and all truth, we cannot but realize our own lack of being, goodness, and truth. Catherine of Siena, for example, refers to herself as “she who is not” in comparison to God who is the source of her being and every gift (Dialogue, ch. 134). And as today’s first reading from Wisdom tells us, the wicked also know that to face holiness is to face our own sin. They say of the just one, “To us he is the censure of our thoughts; merely to see him is a hardship for us” (2:14).
The key question for us, of course, is how we will respond to the encounter with God’s glory and goodness as revealed above all in Jesus. The wicked in the book of Wisdom seek to put the just one to “a shameful death” (2:20); similarly, the authorities in today’s Gospel seek to kill Jesus, though his hour has not yet arrived (John 7:1, 30). And the Psalm makes clear the result: “The LORD confronts the evildoers” (34:17). When we encounter God’s goodness and our own sin, do we react in anger and jealousy? Or, as the Psalm again says, do we allow ourselves to be “brokenhearted” and “crushed in spirit,” not despairingly, but crying out for the Lord’s mercy, so that he might draw close and save us (34:19)?