Saturday after Ash Wednesday
Intention: As Lent begins, we may accept God’s invitation to change our hearts and ways and turn again to him.
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.”
A Lenten Reflection
The story of the call of Matthew provides a powerful lesson on how easily our biases and judgements can 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 Jesus would absent himself from them and choose to be with known sinners. Jesus’ explanation was as eloquent as it was simple: because they need me.
It is common for us to define ourselves in terms of our own ambitions and plans. What we tend to forget is that, first, each of us comes to life already with an identity that transcends our limited social definitions, and, second, each of us exists in a fabric of relationships where everyone is interdependent with and shaped by everyone else. In other words, to fulfill our own life, we must be a part of all lives. A person’s faith journey through life is about accomplishing this. As scholar Joseph Campbell once suggested, “Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.”
Every life in some way crosses paths with the deep distress of the human condition. It is then and there that, like Jesus, we must decide: will we continue on, undeterred and unchanged by our encounter, or will we change our pace so as to meet our best and truest self in the needs of our brothers and sisters? The time of Lent calls us to discover not so much what we will go forward to do, but who we will go forward to be.
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.