Thursday of the Fifth Week in Lent
Gen 17: 3-9; Jn 8: 51-59
Dc. Larry Brockman
It’s too good to be true. But it is true- Jesus is God made man.
The people of Jesus’ time saw him as just another person. They didn’t believe he was God made man. It never even occurred to them, especially the Jewish leaders. But then He says in today’s Gospel: “Whoever keeps my word will never see death”. Yet his word, his teachings were revolutionary; and his promise of not tasting death seemed madness. Jesus taught things like love your enemies; don’t condemn others; turn the other cheek; and give to the poor. He used the beatitudes as a rallying cry. And the beatitudes spoke about the humble and the meek and poor and persecuted, not the strong and capable and self-confident and in-control. It was a litany of “do’s” rather than a litany of “do not’s” like the ten commandments. Jesus teaching wasn’t consistent with their culture; it wasn’t their way. They had come to interpret the scriptures and the law in human terms because they didn’t seek to “know” God; they only knew about him and His law. It was like they were trying to recognize the face of a person from a description rather than from a photograph. But in so doing, they were missing so many of the features of the true face.
The same thing can happen to us. We can study the scriptures and the Catechism and the words and concentrate on knowledge about God and the law of God but, in the process, fail to really know God. And it is in knowing God that we learn the most important lessons about following Him.
First of all, we can know God by knowing Jesus, his son. That means knowing the Gospels so well that we actually live out the values of the Gospels in our lives. Second, we know God by praying- praying in such a way that God is included in all of our decisions, kind of like we communicate and dialog with a good friend or confidant about our lives.
Lent is a perfect time to get to know God. We should be taking the necessary time to read the Gospels so that Jesus words in them are a living experience to us, and we should be taking the time to pray and reflect on our lives so we can ask Jesus to help us and to be with us through thick and thin.
If we know God and have a feel for how His son lived and breathed life on this earth then we will come to be like Jesus. And when that happens, we will have a strong sense of Christian hope- Christian hope that no matter how tough the going gets, when we know God and follow after the way His son Jesus acted, we will be saved for eternal life. Christian hope guarantees that there is something better- everlasting life, because a true Christian will never taste death. And they know it!
Tags: Christian Hope, The Incarnation