Tuesday of the 1st Week of Lent, Year B
(Isaiah 55:10-11; Matthew 6:7-15)

Yesterday I failed to mention that the gospel that was selected to accompany the reading from Leviticus 19 on being holy was the famous but frequently side-stepped passage from Matthew 25:31-46 depicting the Last Judgment. Recall the king saying “to the right” and “to the left” based on whether or not persons saw and responded with compassion to the hungry, thirsty, lonely, naked, sick, and imprisoned. Together, the Leviticus passage and the pericope from Matthew’s gospel form a vivid and memorable diptych on the theme of holiness as love-in-action. Love embodied in the form of the common deed.

Today’s readings seem an apt follow up to this theme (Isaiah 55:10-11). Isaiah speaks about how just as the rain and the snow fall upon the ground and nourish the earth providing “seed for the one who sows and bread for the one who eats,” so too is the word that comes forth from God’s mouth fecund (not void or empty) carrying out the divine will and achieving the end for which it was sent. It is easy and perhaps characteristic to read this text and imagine ourselves like the earth that is nourished by God’s word.

But it is also the case that we too are spoken into this world by God – as Nicholas of Cusa put it, “Every creature is a word of God and a book about God” – raising the evocative and provocative question of whether or not like the rain our lives are greening the world, nourishing others, bearing fruit, giving life. Do our lives provide seed for the sower and bread for the hungry? Are we fulfilling the end for which we were made?

This idea is also captured in the gospel for the day which recounts Jesus’ teaching his disciples the essential dimensions of prayer which include praying for God’s reign (Βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ – Basileia tou Theou) to come to fruition “on earth as it is in heaven.” Again, the hallowing of the Divine name and the hallowing of our lives by how we live are depicted as coming down to participating with the Divine in making God’s dream real, tangible, visible, and available now.

This morning, before getting to the fire road that goes up into the hills behind my home where I hike, the blacktop path that I walk each day through the park was lined with cherry blossom trees in the adolescence of their flowering. When we lived in Princeton, we had exquisite, tall cherry blossom trees in the courtyard of our apartment. My daughter was a toddler and she and I used to call them “the pink popcorn trees.” Today, as back then, they made me utter an “ooh!” and an “aah!” and I took such pleasure in this corridor of pink delight. Their simple elegance always brings a smile to my face as it seems that these usually humble and unassuming trees can no longer contain their natural but hidden exquisiteness and surrender to the sheer beauty and grace that yearns to flower forth from within them. And we hear the question whispered within us — Are we fulfilling the end for which we were made?

This too is our journey during Lent. As we awaken from the nakedness of our winter to be reaching branches carrying buds of possibility and then, in due season, when nothing any longer can contain the blooming gift we each are born to bring to the world, we will blossom together like pink popcorn trees, like Jesus flowering forth from the tomb, like corridors of mercy, justice, joy, and peace that line and show us the way.♦

~ REFLECTION Q? Are you aware of the bud in you that is waiting to flower in fulfillment of that for which you were made?

~ Today’s prayer mantra: “With Your help, I am slowly budding.”

pax
djm