D.L.

FOURTH WEDNESDAY 13th/ MARCH OF LENT

“All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads.
“He trusts in the LORD,” they say, “let the LORD rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.””
(Psalm 22,7-8 NIV11-GKE)

“And then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand. Then they knelt in front of him and mocked him. “Hail, king of the Jews!” they said.”
(Matthew 27,29 NIV11-GKE)

People can sometimes be very cruel; the mocking and violence that is heard and seen are disturbing. Yet, some of us have become insensitive to the visible signs of sin. However, when the Holy Spirit is in us, and we are in deep communion with him, the tendency is not to be insensitive but very much the opposite. I have seen this kind of crowd behaviour we all have witnessed through the media. Families ripped apart, and some taken hostage are daily occurrences.
Yet it is in those very places where we are called to be different, to be a light. Jesus on the cross, in that place of much death, was a light.

Lord, help me to become more sensitive to your promptings and, in this time of lent, to become aware of what you suffered for me.

In this season of Lent, O God, unsettle us. Increase in us that sense of gnawing that arises from the incongruity between our lives and the life to which you call us, and transform us in newness. Amen.¹

1. Walter Brueggemann, A Way Other Than Our Own, Accordance electronic ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 35. ↩︎