ENCOUNTERING GOD'S MERCY AND LOVE

SATURDAY, THIRD WEEK OF LENT   

Hos 5:15-6:6; Ps 51:3-4,18-21; Lk 18:9-14

Our Spiritual Vocation to God

Man is a mystery in relation to God. As we have often stated, this mystery originates from the divine will to make man in the divine image and likeness. Hence, each of us is lost in the mystery of self-discovery or self-knowledge. The mystery bears many facets: biological, psychological, and spiritual. We encounter its most complicated aspect in our attempts to understand our moral selves. The complications arise from the confluence of psychological and spiritual streams within our individual awareness, which is often outside our personal control. This feeling of inadequacy in our innermost self to handle our moral weakness and bankruptcy is the original call or vocation to religion. It is the consequence of the disobedience of our first parents, Adam and Eve, and our own personal disobedience to the word of God forbidding us from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The divine instruction is based on our inability to navigate the moral arena. We are morally incompetent because we neither know ourselves nor the origin of spirits. So, our disobedience to the divine instruction results in immediate spiritual death, for the word of God is the cause of our spiritual life. In place of the stream of life from the word, a stream of death, characterised by emptiness and darkness, enters our self-awareness.

The experience of emptiness and nakedness by Adam and Eve is familiar to all of us, for the desire to cover our moral emptiness and nakedness has remained in the human family ever since the fall. The shame and emptiness diminish only when we turn in repentance to the word of God, that is, truth and life. God, speaking through the prophet Hosea, describes the experience of sinful souls. “They will search for me in their misery.” The following words of Hosea are therefore born out of his experience of our merciful God. “Come, let us return to the Lord. He has torn us to pieces, but he will heal us; he has struck us down, but he will bandage our wounds; after a day or two, he will bring us back to life, on the third day, he will raise us and we shall live in his presence. Let us set ourselves to know the Lord; that he will come is as certain as the dawn: his judgement will rise like the light, he will come to us as showers come, like spring rains watering the earth.” Hosea’s advice is for us to reset our minds and hearts to the default setting: to search for God and to love him. This is our original vocation; the reason God made us. Since God does not change, for he remains the same forever, His love for us does not pass away or change in any way. We are the ones changing, causing problems and disruptions in our communion with God. “What am I to do with you, Ephraim? What am I to do with you, Judah? This love of yours is like a morning cloud, like the dew that quickly disappears.”

The word of God that is life deals us death, because we keep changing our default desire to know God and to love Him. Once the default setting to know God and love him is altered, every other activity, no matter how religious it appears, benefits us nothing. “For in sacrifice you take no delight, burnt offering from me you would refuse, my sacrifice, a contrite spirit. A humble, contrite heart you will not spurn.” The parable of our Lord in the Gospel tells of a tax collector, who employed the superabundant grace of God to reset himself to a default setting. “Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood there and said this prayer to himself… The tax collector stood some distance away, not daring even to raise his eyes to heaven, but he beat his breast and said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” This man, I tell you, went home again at rights with God; the other did not.” After the original fall of our first parents, every one of our dealings with God must start with the confession of our sins and our nothingness before God. We must do this, even when we are unaware of sins. The practice of this initial confession conforms us to the Son of Man, who had no sin, but carried the sins of his brothers and sisters on himself. “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the man who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Let us pray: Rejoicing in this annual celebration of our Lenten observance, we pray, O Lord, that, with our hearts set on the paschal mysteries, we may be gladdened by their full effects. 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.