Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent – Priorities

Readings: Daniel 3:25-43, Psalm 25, Matthew 18:21-35.

It is easy to get confused in our Christian life. We are so close to the most Holy, to the most important thing in the world, that we sometimes kind of drift of and begin to believe that it is we who are the centre of the world. Each of us may start to think: I have now been Christian for a certain number of years, and so have I got a certain authority. I have become good at this. Or, as a Dominican brother, I might fall into the temptation of believing that I have a certain seniority over others. After all, haven’t I made some great sacrifices? Don’t I represent the very core of the Church? 

And as we grow bigger in our own eyes, it becomes more and more natural for us to think that we are – or should be – God’s first choice. As we get bigger in our own eyes, a certain blindness comes in, a blindness to all that is new. We become like the historian whom God brought back in time so that he could get to witness the very Creation. The historian lifted one eyebrow and said: ‘I think I have seen something similar before’. 

This perspective is neither the spirit of the Gospel nor the Spirit of God. ‘Look, I am doing something new, now it emerges; can you not see it?’ (Isaiah 43,19) asks the prophet, and mentions a new song that we should sing along with the whole of creation (Isaiah 42,10). 

 Those who really know this song are the children! Charles Peguy wrote a book called ‘The Mystery of the Holy Innocents’. In a passage, he begins to meditate on the child who has this extraordinary capacity of saying the same thing over and over again without getting tired. The child says ‘Good Morning’ and ‘Good night’ not once or twice; it can go on and on! ‘Good morning. Good night. Good morning. Good night. Good morning… ‘ And the 20th time is just as funny as the first. How can this be, asks Peguy. Well, that is because for the child, every time is like the first time. 

 This is the nature of the revelation in Christ. It is ever new, ever about to become real. We get to hear secrets that are being whispered into our ears, if we just bother to listen. The prophet says about those secrets: ‘they have just been created, not long ago, and until today you have heard nothing about them, so that you cannot say, ‘Yes, I knew about this.’ (Isaiah 48,7) To turn to Christ is to expect the unexpected, to let him cure our ‘stiffness’ and make us more flexible, and to lay aside our self-made layers of authority and our spiritual tiredness that make it so difficult to see the immensity of the Gospel. As we approach Christ in the Holy Communion, let us then pray with the words that we find in a chorale in Bach’s oratorio St John Passion: 

Jesus when we will not turn, 

Look on us in kindness: 

Make our hearts within us burn; 

Rouse us from our blindness.