Fourth Sunday of Lent Cycle B
03/07/2021
Fourth Sunday of Lent
March 1,2021... also known as...
Laetare Sunday...
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...How does God work in our lives?
...In ways that make us feel warm and fuzzy?
...Through situations that are hard and difficult?
We all have heard that God loves each one of us and wants us in eternal life with Him. That is really what our Lenten journey is about.
The readings from this Sunday help us to appreciate how God works in our lives.
We all remember the struggles with trusting God for the people in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. God's Chosen were sometimes following God, then complaining, then rejecting Him and turning to other pagan gods. This happened not once, but again and again, generation after generation; and it happens to each of us even today.
The first reading gives us some idea of how God worked in the history of this wayward people. God worked in all the ups and downs throughout human history. He never gives up. Even out of what seems like betrayal and disaster, God is still able to work to bring about his kingdom.
This people had lost everything and had been taken into the Exile in Babylon. All seemed hopeless...
But God worked through the pagan king Cyrus who would let the people go and return to the destroyed Jerusalem and it Temple and to begin to rebuild.
How could God work through a pagan...But he did and does.
He can certainly do the same for each of us today. Their story is our story and God will never give up on us either. It is so easy to forget and give up on ourselves. Something God will never do.
In the Gospel Nicodemus wanted to believe in Jesus and came to talk with him secretly in the night. Jesus told him that He is God. Still Nicodemus was not willing to give himself totally to Jesus. But Jesus never gives up on Nicodemus.
At times, we can be like Nicodemus; we want to do the right things for Jesus, but we also want to continue to be a Christian in secret.
In the second reading St. Paul, while imprisoned in Rome, wrote to the Ephesians who were faced with struggles, persecutions, threats of death, and rejections. Paul encouraged them to not be afraid.
No matter how often we may sin and turn from God, as did the Ephesians, God is always there waiting for us to return.
The key for each of us is to be able see our sins and to return to God again and again. And that means to seek forgiveness rather than giving excuses or blaming the other.
It is so hard to understand that this process is the way God works in our lives, just as He has throughout all of human history.
It seems impossible that God would put up with us time after time, and yet, He does.
He can even use our mistakes and sins to lead us back to Him.
St. Paul writes the following to the Ephesians when they are close to giving up...
When we see that at times we sin, we don't love the enemy, we don't have compassion and mercy even toward the person who we think does not deserve it, etc. is the time God is there loving us and forgiving us.
It is so difficult to see that this is exactly how God works.
He can write straight on crooked lines.
At times, we are the crooked lines.
Lent is the time when we have discovered that we are the crooked lines, and that, even so, God can work with each of us in ways we would not believe...
The struggle is to see ourselves as crooked lines and then to...
which means...
A sign of the times . I was speaking before a group of our teens a couple of Saturdays ago, and we were speaking of Lent. I was explaning to them about what people do during lent, and so on. I asked if anyone had given anything up for Lent. The responses were amazing. Texting, Facebook and swearing were the leaders in the group. Wow. I never even thought of those things for teens. We have a great group of young teens.
Posted by: A Facebook User | 03/13/2012 at 01:27 PM