Friday of the 4th Week of Lent
Wisdom 2:1,12-22 | Psalm 33(34):16,18,19-21,23 | John 7:1-2,10,25-30
Look at our colleague there, all smiles and kindness to everyone else, when we’re all up to our eyeballs in work. Bloody bastard, he’s got no right to make us all look so sad! Let’s tekan him and dump all our work in his inbox, then we can relax and go for a coffee break. Must remember to take credit for all that work when we get back, hor?
Raise your hand if you’ve been the target of such a concerted backstabbing.
Now raise your hand if you’ve participated in such things yourself. (Be honest about it.)
It can be a tough pill to swallow, to see others keep their spirits up through all their toil and trouble, while we suffer through the same tasks with furrowed brow and down-turned lips. That’s just not fair; they should suffer just like we do. We don’t care that they have a better attitude towards life that we do, it’s all about equality of suffering, man!
The good man is a light in the darkness for the upright, but he is also a reproof to those who continue to cling to the old ways of slavish adherence to outdated interpretations. The Pharisees certainly didn’t like to hear Jesus claim that God was displeased by their hidebound practice of Mosaic Law; after all, they took great pride in just how many laws they could keep “faithfully”.
Just yesterday, I was introduced to this intriguing article about how adopting the Benedict Option as a counter to the insidious permeation of American pop culture in Christian life:
[which] includes such measures as: stable local living in small intentional Christian communities—“the Christian village”; cutting back on pop culture consumption; orienting the family towards God; creating sacramentally vibrant worship; pulling the kids out of public school and educating them classically either through private school, home school, or co-op; practicing hospitality and Christian neighborliness; buying from other Christians even if it costs more; building Christian employment networks; refusing to compromise to satisfy the whims of the young; fighting pornography—the list goes on. In short: avoid vice, and take up virtue.
can seriously backfire, when it devolves into a game of one-upmanship among the very people who “set themselves apart” to be more faithful to God, a Christian version of a “purity test”.
I wonder if something similar happened to the Jews in the years before Christ, building a corpus of 613 commandments, then using it as a measuring rod of individual worthiness. It would certainly explain the prominence of the Pharisees as opposition to our Messiah.
So then next time we find ourselves reacting negatively to those who express joy in doing what the Lord commands, perhaps we should stop and think hard about why we don’t feel the same way.
After all, as the old hymn reminds us:
Joyful and trusting, we come to You, O Lord,
Ready to give all to you.
Amen.