A Lectio Divina Approach to the Sunday Liturgy

 

 

BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (Series 8, n. 16)

4th Sunday of Lent, Year C – March 14, 2010 *

 

“Rejoice! We Are A New Creation!”

 

BIBLE READINGS

Jos 5:9a, 10-12 // II Cor 5:17-21 // Lk 15:1-3, 11-32

 

 

 

(N.B. Series 8 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 C from the perspective of the Second Reading. For reflections on the Sunday liturgy of Year C based on the Gospel reading, please scroll up to the “ARCHIVES” above and open Series 2. For reflections based on the Old Testament reading, open Series 5.)

 

 

I. BIBLICO-LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS

 

The fourth Sunday of Lent is called “Laetare Sunday”. It is a day of intentional rejoicing during our penitential journey toward the Easter glory.  It is a response to the prophet Isaiah’s exhortation: “Rejoice, Jerusalem! Be glad for her, you who love her; rejoice with her …” (cf. Entrance Antiphon of this Sunday’s liturgy) and is a natural consequence of being the object of God’s prodigious merciful love. Indeed, our Lenten journey of faith, transformation and conversion as Church is also a “journey of rejoicing” for we know that God has reconciled us to himself through Christ. In him, we are a new creation – the old things have passed away; behold new things have come!

 

The theme of rejoicing and newness is evident in the Old Testament reading (Jos 5:9a, 10-12). The Exodus of the Chosen People has ceased. The new generation of Israelites – born during the desert sojourn and purified in the crucible of trials and sufferings in the wilderness – enters the Promised Land. The “reproach of Egypt” – the stigma of slavery – has been wiped away. The new breed of Israelite warriors is poised to claim the land “flowing with milk and honey”. Graziano Marchechi remarks: “In the new land, the manna ceased. During the desert sojourn, the bread from heaven signified God’s provident care. Its termination now signals not God’s disfavor, but Israel’s coming of age. The Chosen People will henceforth eat the fruit of their labor. Their exodus is over and they begin a new moment in the life of the nation.”

 

 

The tremendous love bestowed by God on his people Israel takes on greater meaning in the Gospel parable of the two lost sons and the loving father (cf. Lk 15: 1-3, 11-32). Aelred Rosser explains: “Clearly, the point that Jesus makes in this story is not how bad the boy (or his elder brother) is, but how good the father is. It is the father who is excessive and extravagant and immoderate, anything but frugal with his forgiveness and mercy. It is the father who is excessive and extravagant and squanders love and reconciliation on the son. The father is the true spendthrift here, sparing no cost or labor to celebrate the homecoming of his wayward son. The reluctance of the elder brother to forgive with similar prodigality makes the father seem all the more generous.”

 

As we celebrate “Laetare Sunday” this Lenten season, we are challenged to imitate God’s prodigal love and to share in his immense joy at the homecoming of the “lost son”. The forgiving Father invites us to a remarkable celebration: “But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.” Indeed, we are truly God’s children when we share his compassionate, irrevocable love for all - even those who have gone astray and live in sin. Our joy is understandably deeper when the wayward respond to divine grace and finally come back home.

 

The Second Reading of this Sunday’s liturgy (II Cor 5:17-21) invites us to focus on a very special “son” – Jesus Christ, the incarnation of the Father’s tremendous love for all. Like our heavenly Father, Jesus is prodigal and sacrificial in his love. Through Jesus, God reconciled the whole world to himself. In his beloved Son, we are a “new creation”. Through Jesus, we become ministers of reconciliation and agents of “new creation”.

 

The biblical scholar Mary Ann Getty explicates: “All is new in Christ. Priorities have changed. All that matters is that one is created anew. The same God who created out of nothing is certainly capable of recreating and making us – however poor, unpromising, and undeserving – sharers of his work. God reconciled the world to himself in Christ. Further, in Christ, God overcame the obstacles of our transgressions so that we are enabled to become partners in the ministry of reconciliation. And not only the apostle, but all who are in Christ, have been sent out into the world with a single message: Be reconciled! This is both imperative and empowerment. For our sakes God made the sinless one sin so that redemption could penetrate the darkest, most forbidding, isolated, and inhuman part of our human experience. This was so that God, in Christ, could bring us to holiness.”

 

In the following excerpt from the vocation testimony of Sr. Helen Prejean, the author of Dead Man Walking, she illustrates her deeper journey into God’s renewing, reconciling love and the expansion of her ministry: initially, for the prisoners on death row and belatedly, also the families of their victims (cf. AMERICA,  April 13, 2009, p. 36-37).

 

In my life I have ridden the current (of my true calling) as a Sister of St. Joseph, and as it turns out, the vessel of Sisterhood has proved a trustworthy vessel for me. I was carried a while, seeking to mold myself as an exemplary nun, until the current caught my boat to follow Christ in a very particular, unique work: accompanying death row prisoners to their deaths, being there for them faithfully; visiting, supporting, serving, praying, comforting and confronting, loving, writing and enlisting others to write and visit. Always seeking to show them the face, even as others strap them down to kill them – even when, as a service to society, the state disposes of their lives in a way that’s legal and approved with opinion polls backing it up, shoring up that yes, this is what the people want: your death. And being there to be the face, to be the presence, to assure them, tell them, witness to them even in the last moments of their lives: “You are a child of God, you have a dignity that no one can take from you. Look at me, look as they kill you, look, and I will be the face of Christ for you.”

 

Then, like St. John in his First Epistle, writing, speaking, traveling, proclaiming what my eyes have seen and my ears have heard and my hands have touched – the trembling shoulders of the condemned, led into the room where the gurney waits – that is, the Word of Life.

 

This is the amazing journey into the heart of the Gospel of Jesus: to love, to forgive, to allow no one to be enemy – at least for long – to feel the sufferings of others as our own and then to drop the stones at our feet, powerless now to hurl them at another. The call, I hear it, keep hearing it, to teach the people, to keep getting on planes to reach out to the people, to help them navigate the greatest heart journey of all: from vengeance to compassion, right straight into the heart of a merciful Savior: “Go and learn what this means. It is mercy I desire, not sacrifice.”

 

My own heart traveled first to the condemned, then belatedly to the families of their victims. Belatedly, because at first I did not get it, did not hear the call that I must not choose sides, that I must reach out in compassion to the families of perpetrators and victims alike. After Patrick Sonnier’s electrocution in 1984, the very first man I accompanied, I read with distress the angry letters to the editor in the New Orleans paper about me. My soul was untouched by their anger that I was coddling a cruel, cold-hearted monster. On that score my soul felt pure, untarnished by guilt. They just did not understand. They had not witnessed the torture, the anguish, the futility of his death.

 

No, the guilt came from my neglect of the victims’ families. “She didn’t throw us a crumb”, bereaved parents told reporters. They were right; I was wrong. I had not reached out to them. I was afraid. I was cowardly. I was afraid of their anger, their scalding rejection. So I had stayed away. But I was wrong. Guilt was salutary. The new call of God was in the guilt. I heard my own heart’s anguish. Guilt shoved my boat out onto new waters.

 

I reached out to victims’ families – even if they scorned me, rejected me, hurled insults at me. My suffering was nothing, piddling nothing, next to their great sorrow in the violent, tearing, irrevocable loss of their loved one.

 

Grace was waiting for me.

 

First it came in the compassionate, wide, loving heart of Lloyd LeBlanc, whose only son David had been killed by Patrick Sonnier and his brother. We prayed together, Lloyd and I, and soon I was seated at his kitchen table, eating with the family, they forgiving my terrible mistake, taking me in like a lost daughter.

 

As I write this, my heart still resonates with gratitude. Lloyd LeBlanc was my first teacher. Through him I got a peek into the chasm of suffering that families endure, who wake up one morning and everything is alive and humming and normal and by evening face the unalterable fact of the death of a loved one.

 

 

 

II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART

 

  1. Like the Israelites who celebrated their entrance into the Promised Land with a Passover, do we mark important milestones in our life with a ritual action? How do we celebrate new beginnings and significant stages in our life? Are we ready to grow mature, embrace greater responsibilities, and journey deeper into salvation history … into the joy and fruitfulness of the Promised Land?

 

  1. Are we willing to share more fully in the mystery of the divine forgiving love? Are we ready to be a part of the joy of God’s kingdom where the “lost” are feted with a joyful “homecoming”?

 

  1. Do we realize that in Christ we are a “new creation” for through him, we have been reconciled to the Father? Are we willing to be ministers of reconciliation and agents of God’s “new creation” in Jesus Christ?

 

 

 

III. PRAYING WITH THE WORD

Leader: Almighty and merciful God,

we thank you for leading your Chosen People through the desert

to the Promised Land,

a land flowing with milk and honey and rich in fruitful harvest.

We thank you for the feast of forgiveness

that your loving heart prepares for your wayward but now repentant children.

You are kind and merciful.

You embrace us with tenderness

when we turn to you with tears of repentance.

Above all, we thank you for sending your Servant-Son Jesus,

our beloved brother and Savior,

to bring us back to you.

Jesus leads us to your reconciling embrace,

enabling us to feast at the banquet of your eternal kingdom.

In Christ, we are a “new creation”.

The old things have passed away

and behold, new things have come.

For the grace of this joyful homecoming and for the gift of newness,

we are ever grateful to you.

Help us to be efficacious ministers of reconciliation.

Teach us to be agents of “new creation” in the here and now.

We love you and praise you.

We give glory to you and our dear brother Jesus Savior,

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.

 

“Whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold new things have come.” (II Cor 5:17)

 

 

 

V. TOWARDS LIFE TRANSFORMATION

 

  1. ACTION PLAN: Pray for the grace to be efficacious ministers of reconciliation and powerful agents of “new creation”. By your life of witnessing and service of charity, lead the “lost” to a joyful “homecoming” and enable them to experience the tender embrace of our loving God.

  2. ACTION PLAN: That we may truly experience the loving mercy of God and realize deeply the gift of being a “new creation” in Jesus 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 C, vol. 6, # 16).

 

Prepared by Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang  PDDM

 

 

PIAE DISCIPULAE DIVINI MAGISTRI

SISTER DISCIPLES OF THE DIVINE MASTER

60 Sunset Ave., Staten Island, NY 10314

Tel. (718) 494-8597 // (718) 761-2323

Website: WWW.PDDM.US

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