A PEOPLE SET APART FOR GOD


FRIDAY, THIRD WEEK OF LENT   

Hos 14:2-10; Ps 81:6,8-11,14,17; Mk 12:28-34

The Communion of Love

Because most of us were conceived and born in sin, raised up among sinful people, the awareness of God is not part of our constitutive and foundational awareness. We must strive to incorporate and grow in our awareness of God daily. After the fall of Adam and Eve from the state of pristine grace in which God created them, by which they abandoned the presence and the grace of direct awareness of God, God called Abraham with the intention of growing a people that would inherit what Adam and Eve abandoned by their own choice. The project of raising a people who would truly belong to God, not just by name, but in spirit and in truth, requires the free choice to believe and stay with God through the thick and thin of our sinful human conditions. The task before such people is to receive the word of God with faith and use it to build their worldview, within which they receive and interpret their daily events and realities. Abraham was the first in this divine endeavour. He received the word of God and built his life on it, offering everything to rely on and maintain the truthfulness of the word God spoke to him. He is therefore a foundation of God’s holy people.

The people who came from him as his progeny found it difficult to imbibe the faith of Abraham in God. They received the word of the promise, but not the faith, for they did not entrust their lives to the word of God. The words spoken by God through the prophet Hosea resonate with the shortcomings of the people of Israel in their faith in God. “The Lord says this: ‘Israel, come back to the Lord your God; your iniquity was the cause of your downfall. Provide yourself with words and come back to the Lord. Say to him, ‘Take all iniquity away so that we may have happiness again and offer you our words of praise.’” Their iniquities and ours are rooted in unbelief, our lack of faith and interest in the revealed word of God. When we are not interested in the Lord, we cannot live on his word, for his words would not find a place within us. God’s readiness to build a communion with us is expressed in His willingness to forgive our numerous sins to have us back to Himself. “I will heal their disloyalty, I will love them with all my heart, for my anger has turned form them. I will fall life dew on Israel. He shall bloom like the lily, and thrust out roots like the poplar, his shoots will spread far; he will have the beauty of the olive and the fragrance of Lebanon.” These words of God reveal that He has our welfare in mind at all times. The thought of this should kindle the flame of love within our hearts this season of Lent, especially as we meditate on the Paschal Mystery.

The difficulty of bringing the children of Abraham in flesh to imitate the faith of their father caused God to seek out a new means of fulfilling his promise to Abraham. The promise God made to Abraham was to bring him and his children to inherit eternal communion with God. The centrality of His word for the fulfilment of the promise is the reason the Word became flesh and lived among us. By the Incarnation of the Son, God took our human nature to Himself and made it His home forever. This is the covenant in the body and blood of the Son of Man, through which God demonstrated his everlasting love for us, thereby making it possible and very easy for us to love Him also. By this mystery, God freed us from our slavery to sin and disobedience. “A voice I did not know said to me: ‘I freed your shoulder from the burden; your hands were freed from the load. You called in distress, and I saved you.” Freed from our load of sin and fear, the commandment of love is now easy to keep, as the Lord answered the scribe who wanted to know the greatest of the Commandments. “This is the first: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” The Paschal Mystery of Christ makes the Holy Spirit present with us, for it reveals the love of God in a unique way to us. God, through His Son, has removed all obstacles to our loving Him. Why are we still tardy in loving God and our neighbours?

Let us pray: Pour your grace into our hearts, we pray, O Lord, that we may be constantly drawn away from unruly desires and obey by your own gift the heavenly teaching you give us. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. 

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