A Lectio Divina Approach to the Sunday Liturgy

 

 

BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (Series 7, n. 16)

3rd Sunday of Lent, Year B – March 15, 2009

 

“We Proclaim Christ Crucified”

 

BIBLE READINGS

Ex 20:1-17 // I Cor 1:22-25 // Jn 2:13-25

 

 

 

(N.B. Series 7 of BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD: A LECTIO DIVINA APPROACH TO THE SUNDAY LITURGY includes a prayerful study of the Sunday liturgy of Year B from the perspective of the Second Reading. For other reflections on the Sunday liturgy of Year B, please go to the PDDM Web Archives: WWW.PDDM.US and open Series 1 & 4.)

 

 

 

I. BIBLICO-LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS

 

In this Lenten season we continue our paschal journey toward the Easter glory. The Old Testament reading of this Sunday (Ex 20:1-17) resounds the call to holiness through the observance of the Decalogue – also called the Ten Commandments – a summary of duties toward God and neighbor. The Decalogue is the fundamental law that governs the moral life of the people. But more than just an ethical or moral code, it manifests the special covenant relationship between the living God and his people. It expresses the unfailing faithfulness of the Lord who guides his people on the path of life. Taking the initiative and filled with abounding love for his chosen ones, God enjoins them to follow his saving commands and entreats them to become wholeheartedly attached to him.

 

In the Gospel episode of the cleansing of the temple (Jn 2:13-25), we see the perversion of worship and the warping of covenant relationship on the part of God’s people. Jesus makes a vehement effort to bring the dealers of sacrificial animals and the profit-driven money changers to their senses by driving them out of the temple and ordering them not to make the Father’s house a marketplace. They have defiled the temple by their dishonest trade, irreverence, injustice and selfish dealings. They have forgotten the God whom they are called to love and serve.

 

Harold Buetow remarks: “Jesus felt deeply the insult to his Father’s house, and was uncompromising on the point. Jesus was also deeply moved by pity for the outcasts and the poor, for whom the burdens of injustice were especially heavy … Jesus’ action was amazing when one considers the grandeur of the Herodian Temple, the fierce pride of the priests and scribes who ruled there, and the extent of the commerce carried on in behalf of the chief priests … The Temple was the religious, social and commercial center of the city. Jesus’ deed amounted to open defiance of the Temple authorities … Jesus’ attack made possible the charges of hostility against the Temple that sealed his fate … The last part of the episode relates Jesus’ interaction with the people. He wouldn’t trust himself to them because he knew them all. He knew that to many of them he was a wonder-worker or magician; if he spoke to them of service, or sacrifice, or surrender to God’s will, or carrying a cross, they would not have understood and would have left him on the spot. Jesus’ signs caused many to believe that somehow God is with Jesus, but they failed to see that God is within Jesus. To recognize that God is within Jesus – that Jesus is God – puts a special cast on the entire meaning of everything.”

 

This Sunday’s Second Reading (I Cor 1:22-25) is one of the most beautiful and enigmatic passages in the Sacred Scriptures. The great apostle Paul experienced the living Christ and proclaimed him as the crucified Messiah and glorified by God in the Spirit. The paschal event of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection brought to completion the ineffable saving plan of our loving God. The beloved Servant-Son of God assumed our brokenness and sufferings. He identified himself completely with human weakness so that our own sacrifices may be transformed into saving grace and our sufferings may lead to endless glory. Saint Paul, fully immersed into Christ’s paschal destiny of death and rising, was able to transcend what human reason reveals. He therefore proclaimed the weakness of Christ on the cross as the ultimate power of love. Indeed, the almighty and all knowing God has no need for the false security of human strength and the empty trappings of human wisdom. From his personal experience of the saving event centered on Christ, the apostle to the Gentiles could thus declare with vehemence: “For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (I Cor 1:25).

 

The authors of the Days of the Lord, vol. 2, explicate: “All through sacred history, God shows himself to be disconcerting in his initiatives, as well as in his choice of bringing about his plans. His way of acting is so contrary to human wisdom and calculation that the temptation not to follow him on this path is sometimes great … Today still – and it will probably always be the case – it remains very difficult to believe in the strength of weakness, in the wisdom that looks folly. Only love allows us to understand in a small way God’s conduct … Love is weakness and folly because it does not seek to impose any dominion and because it gratuitously offers itself. But it is an unalterable force because it can resist anything; and it is supreme wisdom because it alone understands everything … Such is the love of God, who risked his Son for the salvation of the world. We proclaim Christ crucified, Paul says simply.”

 

Last March 7-8, 2009, Sr. Mary Rosaria and I went to staff a religious exhibit at the 15th Annual Divine Mercy Family Congress in San Ramon, Northern California. We were adjacent to a booth run by some kind volunteers from St. Joseph Parish in Modesto. Those enterprising ladies belong to the MARY MOTHER OF GOD MISSION SOCIETY, whose goal is to revive the Catholic Church in Eastern Russia. In the early 1900’s, the Russian Far East boasted a thriving Roman Catholic population, but after the revolution of 1917, Siberia became a showplace of the new Communist era, a land without churches and without God. Under Stalin, all Catholic churches were confiscated and many were turned into most degrading use. Thousands of Catholics were murdered and their bodies dumped into mass graves. When Russia finally opened its door to missionaries, two American priests from Modesto, California – Fr. Myron Effing and Fr. Daniel Maurer – went to Vladivostok in 1992 to help re-establish the Church in that region. At their arrival, there were only 6 Catholics. Now there are about 600 parishioners. Moreover, in the 16-year history of the re-establishment of the parish, 10 parishioners have entered the religious life and pronounced the evangelical vows. The kind volunteers from Modesto shared with me the inspiring newsletter, VLADIVOSTOK SUNRISE, edited by Fr. Myron. The following article on an elderly Vladivostok parishioner, Emilia Dyachkova by Tatyana Shaposhnikova (cf. January 1, 2009 issue, p. 1-2) illustrates how the Gospel of the crucified Christ continues to work in the suffering members of the Church.

 

“My whole life I’ve been on the move!” says Emilia as she begins to tell her life story. “I don’t remember my mother – she died when I was three – and they shot my dad in 1935. He was Polish and Catholic, so he was branded ‘an enemy of the people’. My two nieces and I were raised by my aunt whose husband also served time. ‘They’ took everything from us, our property, our faith in God, and accused us of spying. There was hunger, and none of us, adults or children, could find work. People were against us, as we were a family of ‘enemies of Soviet power’, but we still had to live with them.” And tears appear in Emilia’s eyes.

 

“When I was 16 they gave me work in the coal mine in Donbasse. Together with the adults I did all my work. Within a month war began, so they closed the mine. Without money and without help it took me several months to walk back to Verbka, the little village where my aunt lived. I walked home already by December, and in May they moved us all to Germany. For three years I worked for a German farmer doing all the dirty work on the farm. The boss treated us well and fed us, and on Sundays we prayed.”

 

“We were freed by American soldiers on the 9th of May of 1945, and already on May 10th they sent us to the transfer point and took us back to Russia. We got back to our village. The house was in ruins, and some of the villagers had been killed and some had died of hunger. We scraped together boards and whatever we could find to make a hut to live in, and we had to work sometimes twelve hours straight on the collective farm without rest” – it was sad for Emilia to remember. “I didn’t have a childhood, and my youth was spent in a different country.”

 

“I got married, but I didn’t live with my husband very long when they took him and shot him because he lived for several years as a prisoner in Germany. And again there was hunger and heavy work on the collective farm. People always looked at us with suspicion – my father was shot; my husband was shot – but in what way were we ‘enemies of the people’?” she asks herself. “We worked honestly, went to church, prayed about love and happiness. It was a difficult time for us, but God helped us. Sometimes there wasn’t enough energy or time for prayer, but we never went to bed without praying.”

 

“When my son finished school, he couldn’t go for higher education because my father and my grandfather were ‘enemies’. My son was very anxious to study further, so he had to travel far away where they wouldn’t know him. He came to the Russian Far East, and enrolled in the university of Vladivostok and graduated, so I came to live with him.” (She doesn’t mention that her son was beaten and brutally murdered by a band of thugs several years ago – perhaps it is too painful to remember.)

 

“Would I have been able to endure everything and still have love for people without God’s help?” she asks. Emilia comes to every Sunday Mass. You can read wisdom, love, and endless hope in her eyes in God’s mercy to herself and her neighbor. And how many such grandmothers there are! They all have wounds from what they have experienced in life, so that any jogging of their memories brings out the hurt and tears. We have something to learn from them – their patience, their resolve, their love of God and neighbor.

 

 

II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART

 

  1. How do we live out the spirit of the Ten Commandments? What are the challenges and the positive implications of God’s Decalogue?

 

  1. What is the significance of Jesus’ action of cleansing the Jerusalem Temple? What was the dire consequence of this radical action and how did it promote God’s saving and covenant plan?

 

  1. How does the Pauline passage on the crucified Messiah impact you? Have you experienced that the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom and that the weakness of God is stronger than human strength? In the spirit of Saint Paul the Apostle, do you endeavor to proclaim Christ crucified?

 

 

 

III. PRAYING WITH THE WORD

Leader: Loving Father,

we thank you for the Decalogue,

whose spirit regulates and deepens our covenant relationship with you.

Grant us the grace to live fully the Ten Commandments

as the sweet yoke of law that leads to life.

We thank you for your Servant-Son Jesus Christ,

the Rule of Life and the personification of the New Covenant.

In his sacrificial love for us,

we have experienced your goodness

and recognized your compassionate plan to save us.

Your beloved Son Jesus assumed all our folly and pain,

our brokenness and suffering.

On the altar of the cross,

our Savior transformed our hurt and anguish

into a font of grace and healing.

Our great patron Saint Paul

was a beneficiary of your Son’s healing grace.

Inflamed with love for God and apostolic zeal,

the apostle Paul proclaimed Christ crucified to all the nations.

From his pierced heart flows forth

the wellspring of divine mercy, wisdom and strength.

Help us to embrace Christ,

whom Paul extolled as “the power of God and the wisdom of God”.

Together with Saint Paul,

we resolve to proclaim the crucified Christ for we firmly believe

that “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom

and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength”.

We love you and serve you, loving Father in heaven,

now and forever.

Assembly: Amen.

 

 

 

IV. INTERIORIZATION OF THE WORD

 

The following is the bread of the living Word that will nourish us throughout the week. Please memorize it.

 

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” (I Cor 1:25)

 

 

 

V. TOWARDS LIFE TRANSFORMATION

 

  1. ACTION PLAN: Pray that the Christians in the modern world may have the wisdom, courage and strength to proclaim Christ crucified. In any way you can and through collaboration with the MARY MOTHER OF GOD MISSION SOCIETY, endeavor to revive the Catholic Church in Eastern Russia. If you would like to know more about volunteering, please contact Vicky Trevillyan at (209) 408-0728 or E-mail her at usoffice@vladmission.org.

 

  1. ACTION PLAN: To help us appreciate with greater thanksgiving the enigma of the crucified Christ, make an effort to spend an hour in Eucharistic Adoration. Visit the PDDM WEB site (www.pddm.us) for the EUCHARISTIC ADORATION THROUGH THE LITURGICAL YEAR: A Weekly Pastoral Tool (Year B, vol. 5, # 16).

 

 

 

Prepared by Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang  PDDM

 

 

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