This is an invitation to self-knowledge and great humility. This means God knows better what I need than what I ask for. God knows more clearly the direction for my life than the choices I make. And God knows more fully what motivates me than my own self-awareness.
As a consequence, I should feel more comfortable in entrusting myself to God rather than to my own abilities. This is truly living God’s lordship in our lives.
Thought
To be fully known and yet to be greatly loved is a blessing indeed! It is the great surprise that can nurture us.
John 6:35
March 18
The Living Bread
The Christian life is one of discipleship, obedience, and
service. It is also a life of being sustained and nurtured. And in the most unlikely places and ways, God provides bread and wine for the often uneven journey of faith.
We are nurtured by God’s providential care through the gifts of creation. These bounteous gifts should be shared equally by all.
We are also invited to share fully in the gift of God’s salvation in Christ. He is the true life for the world. He is the living bread. In Christ we find life’s joy, meaning, and purpose.
But we all are also invited to open our lives to the renewing,
empowering, and life-giving action of the Holy Spirit, who works
tirelessly and mysteriously to sustain our lives, to beautify us, and to gift and empower us for meaningful service.
And there are many other ways God seeks to nurture us: in the gift of family, the blessing of friends, and the care of the faith
community. Even neighbors and colleagues can be, and often are, a source of encouragement for us. Thus God can use anyone to be a blessing to us. In the Ambrosian Acclamations we read, “O bread eternal, you feed the hunger of your people in desert places.”77 This is a hunger for God, a
hunger for wholeness, a hunger for relationship, a hunger for knowledge, and a hunger for justice. And God can meet this hunger in surprising ways.
Reflection
What we hunger for is an indication of what we want to live for. The Living Bread feeds our hunger.
1 Timothy 2:1–3
March 19
Concerned for All
Christianity is sometimes cast as a world-denying religion with little relevance for the issues of our time. The fact that Christians are called to pray for government and for those in authority already suggests an engagement with society that could have great consequences.
One of the great martyrs of the post-apostolic church, Polycarp, called Christians to pray for all. He writes, “Pray for all the saints. Pray also for kings and magistrates and rulers, and for those who persecute and hate you, and for the enemies of the cross, so that your fruit may be evident among all people.”78
Thus, as an absolute minority in the hostile world at that time,
Christians were challenged not simply to be concerned about themselves and their heavenly reward. They were called to pray for the very people who sought to do them harm. Their suffering was to be the seed for a new world.
What is particularly noticeable about Polycarp’s call to prayer was that he believed this would have an effect. He believed good fruit would come from the suffering community that was willing to forgive and pray for their very tormentors.
This poses a significant challenge for us in the contemporary world where so often we no longer see God at work, where we doubt the efficacy of prayer and where we tend to see the political realm as self-contained and therefore beyond the reach of our prayers. Polycarp’s vision calls us to be a faithful and intercessory people.
Thought
A Christian recovery of prayer may yet revolutionize our world.
Hebrews 12:2–3
March 20
The Strident Christ
There are many ways by which we can typify and imagine Christ: the Innocent Child, the Suffering Servant, the Obedient Son of the Father, the Reformist Rabbi, and the Challenging Prophet. However, the Son of God is always beyond all of our images of him.
How we imagine Jesus often says more about ourselves than it does about the Savior of the world. We try to make Jesus fit into our ideas and values. Often the Christ we supposedly worship is the Christ of our own making.
That we have cast Jesus in soft pastel hues in the modern world says more about the kind of world we have and the kind of savior we want. As a consequence, Jesus is more a loving buddy or friend than a fearless and strong leader. This is because we don’t want Jesus to lead us. We only want him to help us. We don’t want to obey him.
William of St. Thierry, the abbot of a Benedictine monastery in the twelfth century, casts Jesus in very different terms. He writes, “our most powerful athlete, having entered as it were the stadium of the world, was anointed with the oil of the Holy Spirit for the match and rejoiced as a first to run the course of human dispensation.”79
It may well help us overcome our soft Christianity by thinking about Jesus as the fearless leader, the valiant Son of the Father, the brave as well as the obedient Son of God. This picture of Christ may challenge us to become the fearless followers of Christ rather than the consumer Christians we are at present.
Thought
If we want to remake ourselves, we may need to remake our image of Christ. Or more particularly, we may need to let Christ confront us in his otherness.
Luke 15:3–7
March 21
Lost and Found
There are two interrelated themes in the biblical story—our flight from God and God’s search to find us. In the triumph of grace it is the latter that wins the day.
The ancient church father St. Augustine said it well: “I would not find
myself, much less thee.”80
This is so in a number of ways: we do not so much find God, it is God who finds us. Salvation is not the human climb up to the divine. It is the divine stooping down to embrace a wayward humanity. The great theme of the biblical story is the incarnation.
This, of course, does not mean the human is simply factored out. No. In our seeking God is already drawing us. And in our response of faith grace has already been given us. And in homecoming there is already having been found.
But the church father also reminds us that finding God and
finding ourselves are intimately related. This is because God is not only our salvation, but also our true home. We are truly human in
relationship with God and others. We are less than what we can be in flight, in isolation, and without an abiding center.
Thus coming to God does not take us away from ourselves, as if we do violence to ourselves in the act of faith. The opposite is true. We come home to ourselves in committing ourselves to God’s embrace. And in the face of the God of grace we can more clearly see ourselves.
Reflection
Being found is not simply a return to a previously known place. It is entering a new reality.
1 Thessalonians 5:21
March 22
Discernment
It is important to give ourselves to the wisdom of others. The church in its long journey has produced many saints,