Tuesday of the First Week of Lent

Today's Mass Readings

We’ve all probably had the experience of putting a dollar bill into a vending machine, and instead of taking the money, it spits it back out. It’s frustrating. We were doing all the right things, we had the right tender, why would this stupid machine not take our money and give us our chips? In these instances, we probably ended up taking the bill and flattening dog-eared corners, rolling out the kinks on the side of the machine, and feeding it back into the slot. We may have to do this several times – until, joy of joys – it takes our money and we get our treat.

Isaiah prophesied that God’s Word would not return to him void – like a bill rejected at a vending machine – but would continue to work until he fulfilled God’s mission. The pagan philosopher, Aristotle, said that we fulfill our nature when we reach the appropriate ends of nature. For example, a good tree is healthy and produces leaves and fruit; a dead tree cannot be good, it cannot live up to its nature. And for human beings, fulfilling our nature must have a good, moral, and just end.

The word justification that we use in Christian theology means “straightening out.” Consider a metal rod bent out of shape. It will take a lot of heat and rolling to get it back to its original nature. So the Eternal Word was sent to justify us. He was a seed that died to bear fruit in us. Yet we may have to go through many tries and voids before we cooperate with His grace.

A concrete example of this work is forgiveness. We must make an act of the will, that is, choose to forgive. It may take a long time for our emotions to catch up with that choice. In the meantime, we ask for grace to smooth out the kinks in our resentful hearts. Rather than forgiving over and over, we just renew that choice and leave it to God to achieve the end for which He came: love transforming this world into eternity.

Reflection by Fr. Pachomius Meade, OSB