Fifth Sunday of Lent, March 17, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Woven into the sorrow of the world
Create in me a clean heart. O God.
And how, pray tell Holy Spirit, will you make such a miracle? Father of Lights? Savior of us all? One day at a time? My heart is deceitful above all things. But still I will pray “create in me a clean heart, O God” until the day I die.
I do recognize a path toward clean. As Jesus and others point out, I must get dirty before I can be clean. You can wash me with hyssop, but the deceit inside me won’t be touched. I got to get last before I can be first.
What I am imagining is the dirt of life’s sorrow and tragedy getting under my fingernails and into my skin. Might be my own sorrow, but also and more importantly, the sorrow of others. Those who are not necessarily part of my blood relatives, or even my race. Those who are victims, true victims, of the carelessness and violence around them.
Of course not being in the Peace Corps or the Red Cross, mostly I send money, and pray. But this huge hole inside me wants to be filled with action, with bandaging someone, holding someone, letting someone weep in my arms. That, it seems to me, points my heart toward Clean.
Here’s a Steve-poem:
Gathered
From the earth,
the soil of our open sore,
 lifted up on a cross,
on a hill of our piled up pain,
 you endure our suffering,
borne up on the threads of our anguish,
 drawing us into your broken heart.
No one suffers alone.
Â
We are raised in grace
for which willingly
 we are woven into the sorrow of the world,
gathered in you.Â
Today’s Second Reading pits Jesus against the deceitfulness of my heart, as he confronts his own humanity, his own potential “deceitfulness.”
In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.
In his own struggle Jesus draws me in to stand beside him, to hold me against him while he enters all sorrow, all death, all catastrophe. His death and resurrection become my death and resurrection, as first Jesus and then those of us who stand beside him, are “woven into the sorrow of the world.”
The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.
What else is there to do? Where else is there to go?
Whoever serves me must follow me. And where I am, there also will my servant be.
(Jeremiah 31, Psalm 51, Hebrews 5, John 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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