REFELECTIONS FOR EVERYDAY IN LENT

[Dawn Marie]

Friday After the First Sunday in Lent:

THE ordeal of Gethsemani now over, our Blessed Lord walks with sort of a triumph toward His sleeping Apostles.  Three times He had counseled them to pray, three times He had asked them to watch with Him and three times the Apostles had failed Him.

Just anger had surged through Christ when He took a rope and drove the money-changers from the temple, because they dishonored His Father’s house.  His closest friends who, a few short hours earlier, had received their first Holy Communion, had failed Him, and failed Him badly in His hour of need – surly He would have been justified had He upbraided them.  But no.  The gentle Christ walked over to where they took  their rest, and simply said:  “Rise, let us go”  (Mk. 14:42).  Oh, the hope springs up from those words!

The disciples  had failed sadly in one great duty – they had slept when the Master wanted them to watch with Him.  They slept at their post.  He had just told them that they might as well sleep on, sofar as that service was concerned, for the time to render it was gone forever.  Yet there were other duties before them, and Jesus calls them to arise and meet these.  Because they had failed in one hour’s responsibility they must not sink down in despair.  They must arose themselves to meet the responsibilities that lay ahead of them.

What a consoling lesson for all of us.  Because we have failed in one duty, or many duties, we must not give up in despair.  Because a young man or woman has wasted youth, he or she must not therefore lose heart and think the loss of youth is irreparable.  The golden years can never be recalled – the innocence, the beauty, the power may have slipped through our fingers – but why should we squander all because we squandered some?  Because the morning has been thrown away, why should all the day be lost?

The lesson Christ taught at the end of His agony in Gethsemani is for all who have failed in any way.  Christ ever calls to hope.  He bids us rise again from the worst defeats.  With Christ there is always margin enough to start again and build a noble life.  Right down to the doorway of death there is time.  Paul persecuted the church, but died for it.  The door of opportunity opened to the penitent thief on the cross in his dying hour.  So it is always.  In this world, blessed by divine love and grace, there is never the need to despair.  The call after every defeat or failure still is, and always will be, “Rise, let us go.”

Strive every day to make acts of faith, hope, and charity.  Today let us beg for an increase of the virtue of hope.

[Dawn Marie]

Wednesday After the Third Sunday in Lent:

IN THE account of the arrest of Christ, there is a particular and rather curious event that is mentioned by only one of the four Evangelists.  The story is told by St. Mark in these words:  “Then all his disciples left him and fled.  And a certain young man was following him, having a linen cloth wrapped around his naked body, and they seized him.  But leaving the linen cloth behind, he fled away from them naked” (Mk. 14:50).

Since Mark is the only Evangelist to record this circumstance, it is fairly well accepted by Scripture scholars that the young man referred to was St. Mark himself.  It was common among the Evangelists to relate transactions in which they themselves took part without mentioning their own names.  An added bit of proof that it was Mark himself who started out to follow Christ at the time of His false arrest and then deserted under the most embarrassing circumstance, is due to the fact that Mark did much the same after the resurrection.  It was in his very marrow to be an enthusiastic starter but an easily discouraged person.

When St. Paul and St. Barnabas set out on their missionary journey they were attended by Mark.  As long as they were sailing across blue waters and as long as they were in the island of Cyprus, Mark stuck with them.  Even while they traveled along the coast of Asia Minor, John Mark was their minister.  But the moment they went up into the island countries, among the rocks and the mountain streams, among robbers and crude natives, Mark left them.  How tragically sad this whole missionary story would be if it ended there.  But it did not end there.  Mark, by the grace of God and the example and counsels of Barnabas, rose to the occasion and went back to his missionary work and later we find him working with St. Paul, who called him in fond words – “My fellow laborer” (Phil. 24).  The vacillating in Mark became Mark the martyr, for he was martyred for the faith in Alexandria in Egypt.

Two powerful lessons come to us from the story of St Mark; First, Mark in his youth may have followed Christ without counting the cost.  He was impetuous.  He dashed out to the assistance of Christ at the moment  of His arrest.  Not until he was seized by a soldier as a follower and associate of Christ did he realize that he of all the disciples had ventured too close and with too much false zeal and without the necessary accompanying virtue of prudence.  It was not till Mark stood naked before His master and heard the jeers of the soldiery who saw him make his escape that he realized his folly in relying on his own strength.  It was then that he was emptied of his vanity.

The second lesson from the gospel story of Mark should be one of great encouragement for sinners.  Mark had made some good starts but he had failed miserably; yet he did not become discouraged even when the great St. Paul refused to trust him after his debacle of the missionary journey he had made in the company of Paul and Barnabas.  Paul refused to take him on the second trip.  Barnabas, on the other hand, had faith in him and he made good.  If you have made good starts, if you have weakened in your Lenten resolutions, take them up again with courage.  With men we are given few chances.  But God is patient and merciful.  Forget the past and look with new hope to the future.

[Dawn Marie]

Thursday After the Third Sunday in Lent:

ST. LUKE gives us this cryptic description of Christ’s arrest:  “Now having seized him, they led him away to the high priest’s house; but Peter was following at a distance” (Lk.22:54).

Peter was deeply in earnest when he said at the Last Supper that if everyone else denied Christ he would never deny Him.  Peter’s high profession of loyalty and love partook somewhat of the nature of boasting.  Doubtless, Peter knew his own weaknesses and he just had to make vows and assurances of fidelity in public and in a loud voice to convince himself.  Such a mode of acting is the product and sign of a weak, unreliable character.  I have heard of a little boat that carried such an immense whistle that it took all the steam to blow it, so, whenever it whistled, it stopped running.  Peter was somewhat like that – he talked big, he boasted, and in doing, he stopped thinking about his own weakness and dependence on God.

When peter saw the soldiers seize Christ and take Him away, it must have struck him how much easier it was to make vows and protestations of loyalty and fidelity in the heavenly atmosphere of the Upper Room than it was to make protestations amid the awesomeness of the Garden of Gethsemani and the excitement of the Judgment Hall.

But Peter was such a bundle of contradictions.  It is worthy of note that Peter fled when Christ was arrested but then, soon after the senseless and useless panic, it appears that at least two of the Apostles rallied their wavering courage and came back to Christ. The two were John and Peter.  Perhaps the courage of John served to strengthen Peter.  Certainly on this occasion John’s zeal and courage outweighed Peter’s.  John did his best to make up for his temporary defection by edging his way directly through all the obstacles into the very apartment where Jesus had been taken for trial.  John “entered with Jesus. . .  but Peter was standing outside the gate” (Jn. 18: 15, 16).

To what may ascribe Peter’s initial flight?  It may not have been simply the sudden fright of alarm but rather because of his piety, at that period of his history, was fashioned more by feeling than by principle.  He was the man who grew ecstatic on the mount of the Transfiguration and proposed that Jesus and himself and others never quit that great place.  No one can hope to stand firm in time of stress or opposition if his or her piety has been nurtured only in tender hours of emotional enjoyment.  Christ Himself announced the basis for His friendship and service when He said:   “He who does not carry his cross and follow me, cannot be my disciple” (Lk. 14: 27).  Peter failed because he placed too much confidence in his own strength, and he failed even more miserably when he abandoned the cause he had espoused.

Ask your self these questions today.  Whom do you follow?  The obligations you are under is to follow Christ closely and so learn from Peter’s plight that, if the consequences of following Christ afar off be so dreadful, what must be the consequences of not following Him at all?

[Dawn Marie]

Friday After the Third Sunday in Lent:

IT WAS about midnight when our Lord reached the palace of Annas, the high priest who, with the Pharisees who had assembled there, was impatiently awaiting the arrival of the detested Nazarene with feelings of malicious pleasure and bitter scorn.  The Jews did right in bringing Christ to Annas.  Legally, he was the high priest, and held that high office for life.  The truth is that, after only some nine years in office, he was deposed by the Roman authorities. He had various successors, each of whom served but a short time until Caiphas came into Roman favor and took the office of high priest, a position, Josephus Flavius says, he purchased at a high price.  This interloper Caiphas had occupied the position of High Priest for sixteen years when Christ was arrested.

It must be noted that Caiphas was the son-in-law of Annas – and that whenever, in Scripture, the two names are mentioned together, Annas takes precedence.  Annas, therefore, was the leading figure in the conspiracy hatched against the Master, upon him primarily rests the crime of deicide.

For blind men to be fair critics of Michelangelo, for deaf  men to be judges of the musical works of Verdi, for moles to be fair critics of sunshine would be more conceivable than the possibility of men like Annas and Caiphas being fair judges of Jesus Christ!  How could such cruel, base sinners ever be able to understand the sinless Son of God made Man?  Besides their bias, there was natural unfitness, their unfairness from the fact that they were desperate conspirators, plotting against the Messias to curry favor with the Jews and Romans.

Before this mock trial begins let us look at the Prisoner – Jesus Christ.  See Him as He stands bound before His judges and the mob that had dragged Him from the Garden of Olives.  He had gone through the horrible agony in the Garden of Gethsemani; He was weak and exhausted from the emotional strain of seeing on of His own followers betray Him to His enemies; He had seen His other friends desert Him; and he had been dragged through the streets to His mock trial.  The Son of God who had been so faithful to the Mosaic Law was to be a victim of its nonobservance.  You see, the Mosaic law prohibited trial by night or on the vigil of a festival day.  Nevertheless, Christ was dragged before the tribunal in the very middle of the night:  indeed the night preceding the great Jewish solemnity.

Honor with every power of your soul and body the great humility of Christ, the God of infinite greatness and majesty, who allows Himself to be arrested, bound, and led captive by the very men whom, but a few moments before, He had overthrown and cast on the ground by a few simple words from His lips.  Honor Christ’s charity too – charity that placed Him a captive of the Jews in order to deliver you and me from the captivity of the devil – charity that thrust Him into prison to save you and me from the prison of Hell.  Go to the gentle Prisoner of the tabernacle today; for He is right here our voluntary Prisoner, where He remains night and day out of the love for us.  Ask yourselves if you have resembled those who arrested Christ, if you have ever taken our Lord out of His voluntary prison house in order, by your unworthy communion, to drag Him to Calvary and crucify Him anew?