4th Sunday of Lent-Year B
2 Chr 36:14-16, 19-2
Ps 137:1-2, 3, 4-5, 6
Eph 2:4-10
Jn 3:14-21
Give God the Benefit of the Doubt: Believe that His Hand
is Leading You
Beloved in Christ, last week I
attended a conference in Las Vegas. Something happened that is worth sharing
with you. I got lost a couple of times and each time, my GPS would say:
“You have left the route, recalculating! That reminded me of this great
Season of Lent! A time when God reminds us that we have left the route but with
his grace we can recalculate, find the right path, and reach our destination.
This is the immeasurable grace that St. Paul talks about in our second reading
today!
My Dear
People of God, life is a journey; and at times a very difficult one. Many times
on this journey we ask the ancient question: “God, is everything going to be
okay? In the face of Isis, boko haram, Ferguson, and all the unrest in our
world today? We are tempted to ask, “God, is everything going to be alright? We
struggle with sin and at times, the harder we try, the more we fail. Perhaps,
you have tried many Lenten practices like prayers, reading of scripture,
fasting, almsgiving etc. and still you struggle with sin. This could be very
discouraging and you might want to give up. We do not only struggle with
sin, we also have disasters that befall our families. We have illnesses and
death of loved ones. All this makes us wonder whether everything will be
alright. Our readings today answer that question for us.
In the
gospel, Jesus makes reference to one of the moments in their journey when the
people of Israel had to give Moses the benefit of the doubt. All those who did
received new life. The story Jesus referred to is recorded in Numbers 21: 4-9
when the people had gotten tired of the journey in the wilderness and the
manna. They insulted God and Moses telling God that the entire act of saving
them from Egypt was useless. As a result they were bitten by snakes and were
dying. But they prayed to God to have mercy on them and God asked Moses to make
a bronze serpent and raise it on a pole so that all those who raised their eyes
and looked at the serpent would be said. Inasmuch as humanly speaking this did
not make sense to the people, all those who gave Moses the benefit of the doubt
and raised their eyes towards the bronze serpent were healed. They received new
life. Like the people of Israel in the days of Moses, anybody who gives Jesus
the benefit of the doubt and puts his/her trust in his death and resurrection
will have life.
Beloved,
we are a people of the Resurrection! We believe that no matter how broken life
gets, God can put things together; that if we give Jesus the benefit of the
doubt, things will be okay again. God loves us so much and wants the best for
us! That is the faith we celebrate in the Eucharist. If you pay attention
during the mass, you will see that after the kiss of peace, the priest breaks
the bread which has become the body of Christ into two and puts it back
together and lifts it up as he calls on the congregation to behold the lamb of
God. The breaking of the bread symbolizes the death of Christ and the fact that
on many occasions things get broken in our own lives. The bringing of the two
pieces of the broken bread back together symbolizes the Resurrection and
reminds us that no matter how broken things get, God can bring them together
again if we put our trust in him.
Our first
reading from the book of Chronicles tells us that even after 70 years, God
still kept his promises to his people. What was striking about that story is
how God did it. It was totally different from the way the people thought He was
going to do it. They thought God was going to call one of them to lead them to
fight and defeat the Babylonians. In that way the people would have had to shed
their own blood to get their freedom. But no, God had a better plan. To their
surprise, God chose a pagan king, Cyrus of Persia, who defeated the
Babylonians, set the people free without any of them shedding their blood, set
them free, and gave them all that they needed to rebuild their temple back in
Jerusalem. You see what God can do? Indeed, God’s ways are not our ways; His
delays are not denials. He is a faithful God and He works in ways that might be
contrary to what we expect, but He will always make things okay. One Jesuit
called Teilhard de Chardin wrote a wonderful poet/prayer about how God takes us
through life, even on those broken roads:
Above
all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are
quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach
the end without delay.
We should
like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are
impatient of being on the way to something
unknown,
something new.
And yet
it is the law of all progress
that it
is made by passing through
some
stages of instability—
and that
it may take a very long time.
And so I
think it is with you;
your
ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them
shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try
to force them on,
as though
you could be today what time
(that is
to say, grace and circumstances
acting on
your own good will)
will make
of you tomorrow.
Only God
could say what this new spirit
gradually
forming within you will be.
Give Our
Lord the benefit of believing
that his
hand is leading you,
and
accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in
suspense and incomplete.
—Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
Beloved, I don’t know what is
going on in your life right now. But I want to challenge you to do one thing:
Give God the benefit of the doubt.
Add a comment