Daybreaks: Daily Reflections for Lent & Easter

by Ron Rolheiser, OMI

“Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against your own people.
You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”

(LEVITICUS 19:18)

“We know it’s easy enough to be understanding, loving, and forgiving when you are bathed in them. It’s quite another thing when your very adherence to those qualities is making you the object of misunderstanding, hatred, and murder.

In Gethsemane, we see Jesus prostrate, humanly devastated, on the ground, struggling mightily to cling to a cord of sustenance that had always sustained him in trust, love, and forgiveness and had kept paranoia, hatred, and despair at bay. The answer doesn’t come easy for him. He has to pray repeatedly and, in Luke’s words, “sweat blood” before he can regain his balance and root himself again in that grace that sustained him throughout his ministry. Love and forgiveness are not easy. Not giving in to anger, bitterness, self-pity, hatred, and the desire for vengeance didn’t come easy for Jesus, either.    

Our ultimate moral struggle is not giving in to our natural reactions whenever we are disrespected, slighted, ignore, misunderstood, hated, or victimized in small or large ways. In the face of these, paranoia automatically takes over and most everything inside us conspires to create and obsessive pressure toward giving back in kind, slight for slight, disrespect for disrespect, ugliness for ugliness, hatred for hatred, violence for violence.  
 

Like Jesus, who himself had to struggle mightily to not give in to coldness and hatred, we also can draw strength through the same umbilical cord that nurtured him. His Father’s grace and strength can nurture us, too” (8).   

“The Jewish people practiced some water rituals for cleansing themselves of ritual impurity. Thew were sometimes referred to as “baptism” because that word simply means to “dip” or “plunge” something into water. 
These water rituals were usually self-administered, although in the Gospel, John the Baptist administered a water ritual at the Jordan River. 
The Mosaic law listed various ways people could become ritually “unclean” (i.e. unable to touch anything sacred, or enter the Temple area until they were purified). A priest, for example, became unclean if he touched a dead body. A woman who bore a male child was ritually unclean for 40 days” (Feb. 22, 2021).

This week we begin reading from the Sunday Gospels. One way to pray the Scripture is to imagine taking a saint with you and talk with them along the way. For example, Mary Magdalene, or Peter, or Mary – the mother of God.

Daybreaks: Daily Reflections for Lent & Easter

by Ron Rolheiser, OMI

“Beloved, do not look for revenge but leave room for the wrath; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’.“

(ROMANS 12:19)

“As a child on the farm, I recall seeing folks break a horse brought in from the wild. Colts that had run free would be caught and forced to submit to a halter, a saddle, and commands. The process of breaking the horse’s freedom and spirit was far from gentle, and yielded a mixed result. The horse was now complaint, but part of its spirit was gone.

That’s an apt image for the journey, both human and spiritual. Life, in ways that are far from gentle, eventually breaks our spirit, for good and for bad, and we end up humble, but we also end up somewhat wounded and unable to – metaphorically -stand upright.  

Because of the pain of our brokenness, we focus more on ourselves than on others, and we end up disabled. Bruised and fragile, we’re unable to properly give and receive. We stutter, reticent to share the goodness and depth of our own persons. 
 

Perhaps when the priest blesses the congregation at the end of a liturgy, instead of saying, “Bow down for the blessing,” he might say instead, ‘those of you who think you are not in need of this blessing, please bow your heads and pray for God’s blessing. Meanwhile, those of you who feel beaten, broken, and unworthy of this blessing, raise your heads to receive a love and a gift that you have long despaired of ever again receiving’.” (7).  

In 1925, Pope Pius Xi instituted the feast of Christ the King. The feast has often been misunderstood, with folks conjuring up images of earthly kings. Pictures and statues have Christ wearing, of all things, an elaborate gold crown.

But Christ is a king who wears no crown like that. People put this kind of crown on him – he didn’t. The only crown he ever wore was a crown of thorns.

The life of Jesus is the story of the great reversal. This is a king who washes feet, who is at the table as one who serves, who calls everyone sisters and brothers, who says the first are last and the last first, and who leaves no one out. This is a king who mingles with lepers, the blind, the deaf, the crippled, sinners.

The life of Jesus is the story of kingship turned upside down. Tribute, in his kingdom, is given to the poor, the meek, the sorrowful, the hungry, the merciful, the peacemakers.

Like the disciples, I can have a hard time letting Jesus be who he is. I’d rather make him something he isn’t. Of course, I have a vested interest because whatever he is, that will be my way, my truth, my life.

Our logo is the cross, not the brown. At baptism, the Church didn’t crown me. It drowned me. At confirmation, the Church didn’t put a royal sword in my hand. It put holy oil on my head. At the Eucharist, I don’t stand back and adore an enthroned king. I travel the way he got there, which is what I do from the preparation of the gifts to the great Amen…

Let’s put this royal crown back in the bag. Let’s live, not under the sign of the jeweled crown and all the values associated with it, but always the sign of the cross.