Dear Friends,
Let’s admit it. We like to control our lives and the way
they unfold. We plan our days. Interruptions frustrate us. So, if we are unable
to make a connection for a vaccination, or our computer goes haywire, we fume
and we mutter and our household knows about it.
We’d also like to control God, and the Scriptures today
illustrate that our efforts don’t succeed.
In the year 587, after years of complacency and disregard
for God, the inhabitants of Jerusalem awoke one day to see the armies of
Babylon at their gates. Today’s first reading tells us that Jerusalem was
leveled, the temple destroyed and the people taken a thousand miles away into
captivity.
But God, faithful and unconditional in love, sent the people
a savior – one who would set them free so that they could return to their
homeland. Remarkably, unexpectedly, it was Cyrus, the King of Persia –Cyrus,
the outsider, the pagan was God’s anointed.
The Israelites were overjoyed but befuddled. God had stepped
outside of Israel to save Israel. That wasn’t in their game plan.
In today’s Gospel, Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night. Nicodemus
needed the darkness, lest he be seen, lest he be wrong about Jesus. But in
their long conversation, Nicodemus began to understand Jesus as the one sent by
God – as the way to eternal life. A whole new world was opening up for
Nicodemus – a world he never anticipated or expected a world he could not
control.
Cyrus was the unexpected savior of Israel. Jesus was the
unexpected one for the people of his time. Who is the unexpected one for us?
Jesus? Yes and no.
In one sense we expect Jesus to be our savior. After more
than 2000 years of Christian history, the expectation is in our heart and soul.
We expect Him in the Eucharist, in the Scriptures, in prayer. In these ways, our
mind controls and limits the way Jesus comes to us.
It’s the unexpected Jesus who is harder to recognize. Thomas
Merton, the unconventional Trappist spiritual writer, offers us an intriguing
insight into why Jesus is hard to recognize in our world today. It’s especially
appropriate now, during our second Lent in COVID restrictions. “We are carried
away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, too many demands…The frenzy of
life kills the roots of inner wisdom…” The attempt to keep going with maximum
output through this pandemic neutralizes our ability to see God, the unexpected
one, in the midst of this set of unique experiences. There are far more
important and lasting treasures in life to discover – joy, hope, companionship,
gentleness, humor and the dignity of the human spirit.
Like the Israelites who had to accept that God could work
outside Israel, like Nicodemus, who had to adjust his thinking about who the
Messiah might be, we need to enlarge our thinking, look at daily things with
new eyes, to rest in the Lord more deeply, to change our hearts, so that in the
unexpected and perhaps unwanted people, events and moments that crowd our life
this year, our unexpected God is made visible and touchable.
How will it happen for any of us is unclear, but it happened
to the Israelites and Nicodemus, why not us? The first step is to stop, look
and listen. Jesus, the unexpected one is here.
~Sister Joan Sobala
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