Lent Week 4: Wednesday
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Today’s readings: Isaiah 49:8-15; Psalm 145:8-9, 13cd-14, 17-18; John 5:17-30
“My Father is at work until now, so I am at work.”
Jesus makes himself equal to God, both in action and by words. He breaks the Sabbath, and he calls God his father. When they criticize him, Jesus argues that the Father loves the Son and shows him everything that the Father does himself. We may ask ourselves then, what the Father does, and why is it that Jesus remains active on the very Sabbath.
If we turn to the origin of the Sabbath, we read in the first chapter of Genesis how God created the earth and all within it. He gave us the frame of our existence, and then creates the image of himself to rule over the creation. Adam and Eve, and by them all humanity, has been given some of the power of God, some of the same capacity of creativity, of organizing, of shaping the surroundings of man. Still, on the Sabbath, all human beings are asked to stay calm, to remain passive. Is it because God himself rests on this day?
As we read on in the Bible, however, we see that there is a difference between the actions or non-actions that man is called to do on this day, and what God does himself. Because, where man is commanded to lay down his work (Exodus 20,10), God himself “works” in the sense that he blesses the day and makes it holy (20,11). The blessing implies that we receive from God what we cannot give to ourselves. It is a day of healing, a day of restitution, a day of life. It is not, as we may tend to feel, a moral obligation to remain silent and passive during the holy Sunday, like in blind obedience. It is not a day of blindness, it is the opposite; a resting day where we open our eyes for God’s acting in us, it is a day for us to be sanctified by God. This means that we give God room in our life, to let him give us what we are not capable of giving ourselves. We are called to stay close to ourselves, to open up to the source of life within ourselves which has its origin in the Son of God, the source of life (Revelation 21,6). Jesus Christ leads us to God’s blessing, and with his blessing, we may pass on to others what we ourselves have received.
Many mystics have experienced and understood the existential necessity of letting God into our inner life, and one of these voices comes from Charles de Foucauld, a Cistercian monk who directly inspired the foundation of the congregations the Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus. Contemplating for many years in the desert of Algeria, he described this fundamental dimension of the Christian live through a simple sentence. Let us then, in this period of lent, meditate on his words:
– an hour a day,
– a day a week,
– a week a year,
shall man stay in his desert
