Wednesday, Week of 1 Lent

“For as Jonah became a sign to the men of Nineveh, so will the Son of man be to this generation […] The men of Nineveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (Luke 11:30, 32).

Today’s reading is all about recognizing Christ – and what to do when you have. It’s also about a failure to believe, a failure to embrace or understand, a desire to demand more.

Before making his pronouncement that this is an evil generation seeking a sign, Jesus had cast a mute demon out of a man. Even though many people marvelled at what he had done, a few others claimed that he cast out demons by the power of the devil (Lk 11:15), while still others demanded more signs from heaven (11: 16). Jesus denounces those who say his power is from the devil with the argument that a divided house will fall, and so the devil cannot cast out his own. But it’s obvious that the bigger problem isn’t the people who foolishly think his power is demonic. The bigger problem is those who just can’t bring themselves to believe.

Two things about Jesus’ reference to Jonah are interesting. The first is that he says no sign will be given except the sign of Jonah (11:29). But that already isn’t true. All Jonah does is walk into the city of Nineveh and tell the people that it will be destroyed (Jon 3:4). The people believe him, knowing it is a threat from God, and they repent; in the end, God does not destroy Nineveh because they turn from their evil ways. God repents of what He meant to do, and turns away from His anger.

Yet in Jesus’ case, the people have received more than words. Jesus has been doing deeds of power, and had in fact just cast out another demon. They have already seen a greater signs than the people of Nineveh, and yet refuse to believe. You can just see Jesus banging his head against the nearest wall in frustration. In this sense, Jesus’ pronouncement about Jonah’s sign is a condemnation of people’s unbelief; Jesus knows that these people, like those of Nineveh, will be judged and must repent while there’s time.

The other interesting thing about Jesus’ reference to Jonah is that Jesus is, in fact, nothing like Jonah at all. Jonah is an unwilling prophet who runs away to the other side of the world to get away from God, and ends up swallowed by a fish. When God hears his pleas and saves him, Jonah finally goes to Nineveh like God asked in the first place. He preaches about how they’ll be destroyed. Then, the people of Nineveh repent, and God saves them.

And Jonah is really, really mad about it.

Can’t you just hear him? “God, you jerk, this is exactly what I said would happen back when I was comfortable in my own house. That’s why I ditched you; you’re so freaking gracious and merciful, full of love and slow to anger, I just knew it would come to this. But noooooo! You made me come all the way here, you got me eaten by a damn fish, to do your dirty work and deliver your stupid meaningless threats. I’d rather just be dead. Stupid God.” Then Jonah stamps off to sit in a proverbial corner.

Jesus isn’t the reluctant prophet: Jesus wants to deliver God’s message. Unlike Jonah, Jesus doesn’t fail to get that the point is leading people to repentance, rather than to consume them in a fiery rage. Jesus is not mad about God’s desire to save us (though he seems a little put out by our unwillingness to listen). Jesus is like God in the story of Jonah, while the people who refuse to believe are more like the Jonah who listened to God without being willing to understand.

After Jonah goes off in his little corner, God grows him a lovely plant to give him shade, and Jonah’s happy for it. The next day, God kills the plant, and Jonah grows faint from the heat. God asks Jonah if he’s right to be angry for the plant, and Jonah replies that he is, mad enough to die. “Stupid God, you killed my plant. I liked it, and now I’m miserable. Why’d you have to kill it?”

God replies, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labour, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh” (Jon 4:10-11)? Silly Jonah: it was never your plant to begin with, it was mine.

Jesus, like the Lord, is hoping that we will see the signs he sends so that he can save us; after all, we are the fruit of his labour and he does not want us to be destroyed. We must strive to see Jesus so we can turn to him; we must strive to be like the Ninevites, and not like Jonah who refuses to see the good God is working because it doesn’t match what he wants. 

Tuesday, Week of 1 Lent

“For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15).

In today’s reading, Jesus tells his disciples not to “heap up empty phrases” (6:7); God doesn’t hear you because of endless words but, instead, God knows what you need before you even ask him. Because of that, Jesus teaches us to pray using the words to the Lord’s Prayer. He then goes on to emphasize our own responsibility in living the kind of life we’ve asked for – we need to forgive others if we desire God to forgive us.

The Lord’s Prayer begins by hallowing God’s name and establishing a relationship between us: “Our Father who art in heaven” (6:9). The whole prayer flows from that relationship. Since God is our Father, we can ask him to fulfill our needs. And since we hallow God’s name, we have a responsibility to lead lives befitting God’s holiness.

Giving glory to God is about more than just asking him to forgive us. We, too, have a part to play in our relationship with the Father. He asks us for so little, only that we let go of the hatred and anger that burdens us, so that we can accept God’s love and forgiveness instead of having hearts poisoned by an unwillingness to forgive.

Forgiving someone else doesn’t actually do a whole lot for that person: they still have the responsibility to seek out relationship with God, to heal that relationship by asking God to forgive them, to grow in that relationship by asking God for the strength to turn from further wrongdoing. Forgiving someone else does a whole lot more for us than it does for them, because it makes us open to the process of forgiveness. A person who has never forgiven cannot truly accept forgiveness or know its value. It’s like Jesus said: who will be more grateful and full of love for God, the one who has been forgiven of little, or the one forgiven of much? By acknowledging the gift of offering forgiveness, we begin to understand how much more we receive when forgiven by the One with whom our relationship has been most damaged by sin.

At the end of the prayer, Jesus emphasises that, by praying to God and seeking relationship with him, there are things we must do. Our prayer cannot be empty words heaped up before God, or promises of wanting a relationship with Him in which we do nothing. Our prayer must include the way we live, because the things we do are part of our relationship with God and are thus prayers. The simplest way to put this is to say that life itself is the prayer. So we must live giving glory to God, relying on Him, and seeking to draw closer to him by living with love, as He loves us.

Monday, Week of 1 Lent

“for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (Matthew 25:35-36).

In this reading, Jesus tells us that the righteous (the sheep) will be at his right hand, while the wicked (the goats) will be cast out into eternal punishment. The reason he gives to both groups is that they took care of him when he needed it.

Both sets of people do not understand when this happened: surely, Lord, we have never done, or not done, those things for you? Surely we would remember meeting you, would remember that you were in need? When did we ever help or ignore you?

Jesus answers them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (25:40).

That’s the rub, isn’t it? Jesus chooses for his brethren the lowly and the needy; we would never ‘see’ Jesus in them if we were looking for him. It’s a strange concept that you can ‘do unto’ one person by your actions toward someone else entirely. Ordinarily, we would never say that was true: if you help your neighbor with his problems, you’re not helping your mother at the same time, right?

But Jesus thinks differently. Jesus thinks that because he loves these people, in fact loves all people, the way that we treat them affects him. He is angry if we mistreat them, and happy when we treat them well. It is to him that we do these things because he has chosen to be involved in their lives, to care about what happens to them. Ultimately, they belong to him, and so how any of his children is treated becomes a reflection of how we are treating him.

Jesus commands us to love our neighbour as ourselves, and we are told that we cannot possibly love the God we have not seen if we do not love the neighbour whom we have seen. Jesus is there with each and every human being, making our interactions with each other a reflection of how we receive God’s love in the other. Do we treat the other with dignity and respect, recognizing that they are worthy because God loves them? Or do we scorn those who don’t appeal to us, privileging ourselves over the other and scorning God’s love for them as somehow unimportant?

The truth is that no one can earn a place at God’s right hand – it is a free gift given by the One who made and loves us. But there is also no room in God’s kingdom for those who are unwilling to love, because a heart that is not open to the needs of another is not open to God, either.

During Lent, let us strive to see Jesus in others, that we may come to see each interaction as an opportunity to love God, to be open to God’s healing, and to give glory to the Name of Jesus to whom all our lives belong.

First Sunday of Lent

“And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased’” (Mark 1:10-11).

I once read a book titled The Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. In it, this scene goes very differently – Jesus is baptized by John and is being held underwater when the Holy Spirit makes this astonishing pronouncement. As a result, everyone gets to hear what the Spirit says except Jesus. Everyone is stunned, but Jesus has no idea what’s going on. Jesus is a bit perturbed that his Father couldn’t have waited until he was out of the water. I imagine, if it had happened that way, it wouldn’t have made much difference: Jesus already knows who he is, and the voice is really for us anyway.

But I digress.

This reading tells us that Jesus isn’t just some guy hanging out by the Jordan waiting for one of John’s special dunkings. He isn’t just a really enlightened man, or someone we can be exactly like if we try hard enough. He is the Son of God, a Person of the trinity who has a special relationship with the Father and the Spirit. If we want to recognize Jesus, we have to remember that he’s both fully human and fully divine.

For all his divinity, The Spirit chases Jesus right out into the wilderness to be tempted for forty days. This Christ, our Messiah, isn’t promising us an easy road. His certainly wasn’t. Just because the Messiah has come doesn’t mean that temptations will disappear, that hardships will melt away, that the world will suddenly be a place where everyone has enough to eat. While we believe that the world will be redeemed and perfected on the last day, we can’t believe that we only see Jesus in the happy, good parts of life.

Jesus hallows our suffering not because it is good – or to make it good – but by sharing in it. God doesn’t intend for bad things to happen, but he does redeem them by using them for His purposes. Like Jesus in the desert, we have a chance to work with God through hardship because Jesus entered fully into the human experience, including its weaknesses. He calls us to repent, to turn back to relationship with God, even – and perhaps most especially – in the midst of our deepest pain.

Jesus shows us that relationship with God is the key to allowing the Father to transform our suffering for purposes we can’t even begin to understand. Relationship with God is the gateway to a true happiness that includes but does not eliminate our suffering. Because of Jesus, the Beloved Son who went into the desert so we would not have to travel the wilderness alone, the kingdom of God is established in the midst of us.

In the middle of all our strife and suffering, the inheritance of a fallen creation, Jesus is here, ushering in the kingdom, and calling us anew to love.

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15).

Saturday after Ash Wednesday

“And Jesus answered them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance’” (Luke 5:31-32).

In this story, Jesus tells Levi the tax collector to follow him, and he does so without question, leaving everything behind. What he seemingly didn’t leave behind – and what irked the Pharisees so much – were his apparently disreputable friends. Levi threw a big dinner party for them, with Jesus as the guest of honour. Predictably, the Pharisees harped on about it, and Jesus had to explain that the people he came to party with include all the guys who would probably be jeered out of the Synagogue. Since even the Pharisees were at Levi’s party, Jesus really isn’t too particular about who’s invited.

Jesus is at work in the tax collector, the sinner, and even the Pharisee, calling them to repentance as he heals them. We probably shouldn’t get in the way by shunning them, or by failing to invite them in, or by belittling them, or by questioning Jesus’ motives in wanting them around in the first place.

We can recognize Jesus most clearly, perhaps, as he works changes in people’s lives, especially when those people seem unlikely to us. After all, we don’t know anyone’s heart, as much as we may be proficient at passing judgement. Only the Physician knows what needs healing. As followers of Christ, we aren’t called to leave behind the people in our lives who no longer fit into our image of discipleship. We’re meant to invite them in, ask them to dinner, and allow the quiet work of Jesus to heal their wounds. It might be that they don’t want to show up, but we can still invite them. It might seem to us that the God we introduce them to isn’t changing them at all, but we really have no way of knowing.

Jesus is in the change, and Jesus is in our relationship with the people we kind of want to shun but whom he’s telling us to embrace. Jesus is also in us, working silently, maybe in ways we can’t see. We too are being healed, as we are invited to be with him and share in his life. We recognize Jesus by understanding that he is calling everyone; and because he calls them, they are worthy of our love.

Giving Up, Giving In, Giving Out

Special Post by Anonymous

So here we are in another season of Lent. The time of the church calendar to dust the dirty rags and sackcloth out of the back of the closet, and make a nice ash fedora on our heads. Of all the liturgical seasons we “celebrate”, Lent seems the most detached from the society in which we live. Like a fall-back to the time when all good believers were supposed to feel like wiggly worms, hunched over in our wretchedness and foul, sin-soaked unworthiness. I had a nice thought, where are my thumbscrews?!?

After all, we’re sons of Adam and daughters of Eve (to borrow the terms from C.S. Lewis in his Narnia chronicles), and under the curse of sin. From the dust we were created, and to the dust we will return. Cue the funeral dirge.

And so it is in this mournful sense that many of us shuffle into Lent, giving up parts of our everyday life – chocolate, television, winning (well, if you’re a member of the Canadiens) – as a reminder of … what? What is it that our self-denials bring to our mind? The better question is: What should our Lenten promises be a reminder of?

God isn’t a spoilsport or a sadist. Jesus said that He came so we could have life, and have it in abundance (John 10:10). However, Jesus wasn’t talking about more, He was talking about better. Life to the fullest is a life spent deepening our love relationship with God, and along the way, being better able to love our neighbour as ourselves. The rest is just noise. It is from this that we are called to give up, thereby opening ourselves up to the better offering that God has for us.

This form of giving up is also a matter of giving in; giving in to the One who knows what abundant life is all about. Lent is a time to take the binoculars off ourselves and look upwards, saying to God, “Your will be done.” Sounding a lot tougher than 40 days without ice cream? In the immortal words of Sarah Palin: You betcha!

Finally, I suggest a third “give” to our Lenten journey: giving out. Make a special effort to reach others on God’s behalf. Give selflessly and readily. Give time. Give money. Give both of your ears to someone who just wants to be heard. Remember, we are the recipients of God’s abundance: let’s share the wealth.

None of this is a recipe for a carefree 40 days. It’s not meant to be. But if we really, honestly take this time in Lent to seek out God in all our daily nooks and crannies, I’m betting the thanksgiving for Christ’s sacrifice on Good Friday and the joy in celebrating His resurrection on Easter Sunday will blow our socks off.

Friday after Ash Wednesday

“And Jesus said to them, ‘Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come, when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast’” (Matthew 9:15).

The triad of Lenten observance is prayer, fasting, and almsgiving – the most recognizable of which is probably fasting. Who among us hasn’t given up chocolate or coffee for Lent? It’s pretty much a certainty that we’ll be giving something up as a symbol of our observance. We’ll probably end up discussing our Lent fasting with growing weariness as the weeks slowly tick by, until we can ravenously chomp down on Easter chocolate.

Fasting is ubiquitous in pretty much every religious tradition, and certainly in JudeoChristianity. But in the reading from Matthew, Jesus explains to the disciples of John that his followers do not fast because they are not in mourning: the bridegroom is with them. Jesus, the bridegroom, is always with us because he is Risen and Ascended, and through the Holy Spirit we are in a relationship with him.

If he’s with us, why are we fasting? We should be full of joy, not mired in mourning. Why such an emphasis on finding God by giving things up?

Our fasting should not be about giving something up for the sake of doing so, or as a sign of mourning. If we fast, it has to be about our relationship with Jesus. We should not fast without praying. Lent has to be at least as much about putting on spiritual discipline as it is about giving something up. We should not fast without almsgiving. If we have so much that we can afford to get rid of something extra for forty days, then we can find joy in giving that something extra to someone who is in need.

Our prayer doesn’t have to be about saying an extra Our Father every day for Lent: it can be about finding new and dynamic ways of thanking God in and with our lives. Almsgiving doesn’t have to be about calculating how much money we would have spent at Starbucks and giving it to the poor: it can be giving our time or skill to someone, or smiling at a stranger, or helping a friend paint their kitchen. It can be anything done for the benefit of another, any giving of yourself motivated by love.

In the same way that prayer and fasting aren’t meant to be about making us sad or keeping tabs on our charity, fasting is meant to fill us with joy by helping our relationship with Jesus grow deeper. Jesus isn’t our taskmaster overlord, demanding constant sacrifice in order to earn his praise. Jesus is our Saviour, who loves us and wants to draw us closer to him.

Sometimes that means giving up chocolate. But most of the time it means giving up anger, revenge, pettiness, and other emotions or behaviours that damage our relationships with God and neighbour. By giving up something that stands between us and God, our fasting can fill us with joy rather than mourning, and help make us into new wineskins that can hold the new wine.   

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

“And Peter answered, ‘The Christ of God’. But he charged and commanded them to tell this to no one, saying, ‘The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised’” (Luke 9:20-22).

When we think about who Jesus would have been to the people who knew him, we tend to think about all the big Technicolor stuff. Jesus HEALED THE SICK! Jesus MADE THE BLIND SEE! Jesus CAST OUT THE DEMONS! Jesus WALKED ON WATER! Jesus BEAT THE PHARISEES IN EVERY DEBATE THEY EVER HAD! And, best of all, JESUS TURNED WATER INTO WINE! All those miracles and he still knew how to party. To the people who hung out with him and followed him around like groupies, Jesus must have been a hip-and-happening dude, a super-powerful religious rockstar, the one who could do anything. That’s one heck of a Messiah-hood: like the Justin Bieber of the Galilee, Jesus was wandering around winning hearts and putting on an endless show.

That’s the picture we’d get if we saw Jesus through the eyes of his most loyal and star-struck disciples. It’s probably what Peter was thinking when he declared Jesus was the Christ.

But that isn’t what Jesus was thinking. He was thinking, don’t go around telling people that I’m the Christ, because they’ll misunderstand. He was saying, I am the Son of Man. The Son of Man is not seen in glory, or in the miraculous. He is not understood in his rockstar entertaining or in his witty remarks. He is the one who suffers, who is outcast, who dies. He is the Messiah, the one who is risen from the dead.

When we look for Jesus in our Lenten journey, we aren’t looking for him in the freakishly-charismatic preacher or in the man who cures the lepers. We’re looking for him among the rejected and the forsaken. On the road to Emmaus, the journey with Christ where we seek for and recognize him, we see that Jesus does not want us to find him in the midst of glory but in feeding the sick, visiting the imprisoned, clothing the poor, and walking among the rejected.   

Ash Wednesday

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 5:5-6).

I once went to an Ash Wednesday service with a Christian friend who wasn’t familiar with this tradition. He stayed through the whole thing, but didn’t go up for the imposition of ashes. When we walked out into the bright noonday, me with my conspicuous ashes and he without, he told me that he hadn’t wanted to get any because of this reading from Matthew.

He felt that the ashes – an obvious sign of the worship we’d just been doing – were against the spirit of a Gospel which tells us not to wave our religious observance around as a flag of our own moral superiority.

Having wandered around downtown Montreal before with the ashes smeared on my forehead, I’d felt many things about it: ‘embarrassed’ and ‘uncomfortable’ were probably my biggest emotions, because of all the semi-hostile stares you get from people. I personally had never felt like I was using the ashes to brag. But a part of me could see his point.

I thought about it a long time, and I came to realize that the problem with the hypocrites in the gospel reading isn’t that they’re standing on the street to pray; it’s that they’re doing it to be seen by men. If what you want from prayer is the reward of being noticed, the reward of having people look at you in a certain way, then that’s all the reward you’ll get. The true reasons behind our devotions and prayer can only be known in the secret places of the heart, whether we make those prayers in a church, on a street corner, or locked in a room somewhere. What our Father sees in secret defines the true reality of our worship.

After all, the Bible is full of stories where people put on sackcloth and ashes, people who tear their clothes and fast openly. People pray out loud all the time. What many of these stories have in common is that this open worship is all about acknowledging sinfulness, wretchedness, and the need for God’s help and forgiveness. With today’s ashes we’re in good company, as we remember our mortality and penitence through them.

As we seek to discover Jesus, to understand him through this Lenten journey, we need to remember that we are called to be outward signs of Christ, in whom our lives are hidden and whose light shines through us. This doesn’t mean we should be proud or vainglorious or superior like the hypocrite, but it does mean we have to be open to standing out uncomfortably. With the sign of Ashes, we are called to be humble like the Christ who came not to be served but to serve; we are called to turn our hearts toward seeking forgiveness, that we may discover the Jesus who forgives.

“Accomplish in us, O God, the work of your salvation, That we may show forth your glory in the world” (BAS).