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A Lectio Divina Approach to the Sunday Liturgy
BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (Series 8, n. 17)
5th Sunday of Lent, Year C – March 21, 2010
“God’s Renewing Love”
BIBLE READINGS
Is 43:16-21 // Phil 3:8-14 // Jn 8:1-11
(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
We continue our Lenten journey towards the Easter glory. Our Lenten pilgrimage is truly a journey of faith, a journey of transformation, a journey of repentance, a journey of rejoicing, and a journey of love. This Sunday we are being invited to consider more intensely God’s forgiving love and his upward call to renewing grace.
In the Old Testament reading (Is 43:16-21), the prophet Isaiah encourages us with the “new thing” that the Lord God is poised to accomplish – one that would surpass God’s previous acts of grace, even the preeminent Exodus event. Graziano Marcheschi and Nancy Seitz Marchechi comment: “This text from Isaiah is addressed to exiles, promising them the joy of restoration and homecoming … The lines are confessional statement, declaring the goodness and power of God, so powerfully manifested in the deliverance of Israel from slavery. In this passage, God promises a new exodus to a people who have survived the exile. Events of the past and things of long ago refer to the first Exodus. They conjure up images of God’s power and love. But God is planning something even greater. To prove that God’s future action will surpass the miracles of the past, Isaiah describes the coming wonders: a road paved through the desert and rivers transforming the desert into an endless oasis.”
The wondrous “Exodus” and return of the Chosen People Israel to Jerusalem from the Babylonian Exile prefigures the absolute, radical salvation that God would accomplish in the Christian Exodus, which is the passing of Jesus from death to life, in order to redeem and transform us into God’s own covenant people. Immersed into the baptismal waters and recipients of God’s forgiving love, we share in the marvelous, surpassing “wonder” of Christ’s Paschal Mystery. Just like the forgiven adulterous woman in today’s Gospel (Jn 8:1-11), we too are beneficiaries of the saving act of Christ: we too are released from captivity to sin into the freedom and newness of life.
The biblical scholar Adrian Nocent remarks: “The Lord’s mercy is inexhaustible and he does not condemn men but wants them to live, though they must repent if they are to do so. As soon as man repents, God renews him and restores him to his true dignity. We can see this happening in the case of the adulterous woman. Once she has repented, she regains her dignity … The Christian who has sinned but then has repented has no past any longer. Once converted he is a new man in a new world and is able to engage in the activity proper to the redeemed: the praise of God. Our conversion and return to our dignity as sons of God is the greatest of God’s wonderful deeds. Truly he leads us out of captivity, as he did his people of old.”
In the Second Reading (Phil 38-14), Paul asserts the absolute supremacy of the divine grace. He declares that the supreme good of knowing Christ surpasses all the values he ever considered in the past as gain. Paul’s encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus and his conversion completely changed his scale of values. Paul’s salvation was not gained by any merits or works of his own, but through God’s saving initiative in his beloved Son Jesus Christ. Paul realized the absolute necessity of sharing in Christ’s suffering and death in order to participate in the power of the Lord’s resurrection. Moreover, Paul’s response to the saving grace was a dynamic, ongoing pursuit of total communion with God in Christ Jesus.
The biblical scholar Pedro Ortiz explicates: “Paul insists that he has not yet reached perfection, expressing this idea through the metaphor of a race in the stadium. He has still not reached his goal. The goal Paul desires and struggles to reach is the full and final possession of Christ. Even though he has already entered into a true solidarity with him through baptism and faith, the perfect possession of Christ has not yet been realized. Although the image of the race symbolizes human effort, again he insists on the fact that the initiative is from God through the mediation of Christ: he refers to the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”
The following testimony of a Major League baseball player Josh Hamilton delineates the arduous path of his healing and belabored response to God’s renewing love (cf. GUIDEPOSTS, July 2009, p. 38-43). Devastated by substance addiction and alcohol abuse, he finally realized that only by living for God would he be made whole again. The totally renewed Josh hit a record of 28 homers in the first round of the 2008 All-Star Home Run Derby.
Baseball had been my life. Now cocaine was. What consumed me every day was getting high. I tried to quit using – sometimes I’d even stay clean for a few months – but nothing got through to me enough to stick. Not the seven treatment centers I went to after the Betty Ford Clinic. Not the one-year suspension for violating major-league-baseball’s drug policy yet again in March 2004. Not my parents or their anger, sadness and heartbreak. Not even my grandmother. I tried praying, but that didn’t help either.
The only bright spot was the five-month stretch I managed to stay clean, when I started dating Katie Chadwick. Katie and I went to the same high school, but we weren’t really friends back then. She wasn’t into baseball. She’d never seen me play and had no idea how good I’d been. What she loved about me was how good I was to her and her daughter, Julia. I fell for both of them. They made me so happy that I fought extra hard to stay away from drugs and drink. When we were married in 2004, Katie thought I’d beaten my demons. Man, was she wrong.
What was the lowest I sunk? The day I pawned Katie’s wedding ring to but coke? The day we returned from the hospital with our newborn daughter, Siera, and Katie asked me to pick up some things for her at the drugstore? I walked into a bar instead. Or was it the day Katie finally kicked me out and got a restraining order to keep me away? By then I’d graduated to smoking crack. I burned through almost all my bonus money. My binges got worse. I didn’t eat or sleep. I didn’t care about anything except scoring crack. The Natural? No one would call me that now.
One October night in 2005 I blacked out. I woke up in a filthy trailer with a bunch of strangers. Who could I turn to now? My parents cut me off. So had Katie. Granny. Mary Holt, the grandmother I used to kiss before every baseball game. I staggered to my truck, drove to her house and knocked on her door … at 2:00 A.M. “Do you think I can stay here for a while?” I asked, practically begging. She must have been shocked at the sight of me – I’d lost 50 pounds, my clothes were in tatters – but my grandmother took me in. For three days she fed me, hovered over me, woke me, put me to bed. She didn’t lecture me, didn’t judge me. For some reason, she believed in me. “You can get better, Josh”, she said. “You can get all the way better and get back to playing ball.”
Baseball? I’d written that off. And vice versa. But I couldn’t bring myself to dispute her. Maybe part of me was still hoping I could be what I was once was. My addiction turned out to be way more powerful than my grandmother. The fourth day at her house, I bought crack, holed up in the room she’d given me and got high. When I emerged, Granny was waiting in the hall. There was deep sorrow in her eyes, but also anger. “I can’t take this anymore, Josh”, she said. “I can’t sit here and watch you kill yourself, and hurt all the people who love you.” She turned and walked away.
Granny was one of the few people who still believed in me, and I was letting her down. For years I’d wondered when I would hit bottom. Now I knew. You hit bottom when you’ve hurt every last person who loves you. I went back into my room, and the cold, hard reality of what I’d done hit me. I’d chosen cocaine over everything that gave my life meaning. I chose it over baseball, the sport I was born to play. I chose it over my wife and children, my parents and now my grandmother.
I even chose it over God. I dropped to my knees. Lord, I don’t care if I never play baseball again. Help me get right with my family, and with you, most of all. It was my first real prayer in a long while. This time I wasn’t trying to make a deal with God. This was me surrendering, throwing myself at his mercy. “Do with me what you want, Lord”, I said. My eyes fell on the Bible Granny had put in my room. I picked it up and flipped through it. One verse, James 4:7, practically jumped off the page at me: “Humble yourself before God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” I read those lines over and over till they were burned into my memory. Every time I was tempted by cocaine – and the first week going cold turkey was vicious – I repeated that verse: “Humble yourself before God …”
My grandmother’s country cooking helped me regain my physical strength. Emotionally and spiritually, I was healing too, now that I understood what I needed to do. I used to live for baseball. Then I lived for crack. Only by living for God, having a personal intimate relationship with Christ, could I be whole again.
Piece by piece, my life was restored. I earned back my grandmother’s trust, my parents’ and Katie’s. I held my girls again. I started exercising. I learned to face down temptation with prayer. I read the Bible and opened myself up to how God was leading me … to a psychiatrist I trusted … to a baseball program where I worked and rediscovered my love for the game … all the way to the big leagues.
The Cincinnati Reds took a chance on me in 2007 and invited me to spring training. The way my body bounced back after the abuse I’d put it through – that had to be a God thing. I made the team as a reserve outfielder. Opening Day I didn’t expect to play. I was just thrilled to be in the dugout. Late in the game the manager sent me up to pinch hit. I walked to the batter’s box, my heart hammering. Everyone in the ballpark was standing and cheering. I’d never heard that sound like that before. I took a few practice swings and stood for a moment, in awe. This was about so much more than me, so much more than baseball, even. This was about the kind of miracles the Lord can work when we turn our lives over to him. That kind of healing could only be super Natural.
II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART
Do we believe in God’s presence and ongoing miracles in our life? Do we look forward to the future with joy and expectation, trusting in the Lord’s words: “See, I am doing something new!”?
Do we try to incarnate the forgiving love of God? Do we endeavor to respond to his forgiving love by repenting of our sins and by embracing God’s peace and justice in our heart?
Do we allow the radical salvation of Christ to transform us completely? Do we reject our sinful past, straining forward to what lies ahead and pursuing God’s upward calling in Christ Jesus?
III. PRAYING WITH THE WORD
Leader: Almighty and merciful God,
we give you thanks for your forgiving love.
You are merciful and kind.
Totally trusting in you,
we forget the evil deeds of the past
and repent of the sins we have done.
We now open ourselves to the touch of your healing hand.
We desire to be bedewed
by your refreshing grace and renewing love.
In Christ, we consider everything as loss.
Indeed, nothing can surpass
the supreme good of knowing Christ.
In response to your divine initiative
to redeem us through your Son Jesus Christ
and to sanctify us by your renewing Spirit,
we forget what lies behind
and strain forward to what is ahead.
We lovingly and zealously pursue our ultimate goal:
total communion with you,
through Christ and in the power of your Holy Spirit,
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.
“I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus.” (Phil 3:14)
V. TOWARDS LIFE TRANSFORMATION
ACTION PLAN: Pray for the conversion of those who have gone astray from God and have negated his merciful love. By your compassionate stance to those who need healing and repentance, be a channel of God’s renewing grace and upward calling for them.
ACTION PLAN: That we may truly experience that in Jesus Christ mercy and justice have met, 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, # 17).
Prepared by Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang PDDM
PIAE DISCIPULAE DIVINI MAGISTRI
SISTER DISCIPLES OF THE DIVINE MASTER
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Tel. (718) 494-8597 // (718) 761-2323
Website: WWW.PDDM.US
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