Saturday after Ash Wednesday
Intention: As Lent begins, we may be open to God’s invitation to humility and righteousness, striving to live more fully in God’s truth and more faithfully in God’s ways.
Today’s Gospel |Luke 5:27-32
Jesus saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the customs post. He said to him, “Follow me.” And leaving everything behind, he got up and followed him. Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were at table with them. The Pharisees and their scribes complained to his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus said to them in reply, “Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.”
Lenten Reflection
The story of the call of Matthew provides a powerful lesson on how easily our biases and judgements can eventually mire us in absurd self-contradiction. Two groups of men, both consecrated to doing the will of a faithful and saving God, cannot understand why another man would absent himself from them and choose to serve people who were actually wanting for the touch of such a God. Jesus’ explanation was as eloquent as it was simple: because they need me. Compassion is the essential human dynamic within the fundamental human condition. It is a reality that cannot be denied, although that has not stopped multitudes from trying.
It is common for people to define themselves in terms of their own ambitions and plans. The problem with doing this is twofold. First, each of us comes to life already with an identity, one that transcends our limited social definitions. Second, each of us exists in a web of relationships where no one thing exists that is not interdependent with and shaped by everything else. In other words, our role in life is to be a part of all lives and to welcome all lives into ours. A person’s faith journey through life is largely the process of first discerning and then actualizing how best to fulfill that creative and sacred role. Whether labeled call, vocation, or mission, it ultimately is a matter of acknowledging, as scholar Joseph Campbell once suggested, that “our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.”
Theologian Frederick Buechner posits, “Purpose is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s needs.” In each of our lives, there is at least one time and place in which our God-given gifts cross paths with the deep distress of the human condition. It is then and there that we must decide, not so much about what we will go on to do, but about who we will go on to be. Will we continue on undistracted by our encounter, or will we stop to see the many new faces that somehow already seem to know us? Let Lent be an opportunity to slow your pace enough to actually be able to learn who you can be to those who need you.
Prayer
Eternal Father, each day we have the choice of living with faith and integrity or living with hypocrisy and shallowness. Fill us today with the determination to turn away from pride and self-deceit, and with the compassion to see without judgment the lives and the needs of others. In this time of Lent, help us to acknowledge and mend the faults in ourselves, and to serve you by helping to heal the brokenness of our world. We ask this of you who lives and reigns with your Son and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.