One of the more interesting features of life in the 21st century is our instinct for destroying the peculiar! Few societies have waved the banner of radical individuality so wildly, yet demanded so thorough a conformity in thought and deed. "You may think and do whatever you wish," it says, "provided you don't attribute any ultimate value to your thoughts or actions." It's no wonder that so many of us are intellectually bored and emotionally numb.
You and I are wired for meaning. Despite the gargantuan efforts of social reprogrammers, most of us still find ourselves moved to tears by deeds of heroic sacrifice and repulsed when thugs manhandle the weak. And the rest of us wish we did. In other words, we have a persistent intuition that what we do really counts...and with that, that we matter.
It is to this profoundly human sensibility that God addresses himself when he calls Israel into covenant. The call itself is pregnant with significance. It declares, "You are more than the product of some meaningless chaotic collision of atoms!" Then it invites us to transcend the maddening ordinariness and flatness of our culture vision of life.
"Cast out into the deep" (Luke 5:4), is God's invitation for us to "become who we are" (Pope John Paul II). No one who has ever taken up this covenant with integrity has ever regretted it. With this invitation we are called into the grandeur of "the obedience of faith."
"And today the LORD is making this agreement with you:
you are to be a people peculiarly his own, as he promised you;
and provided you keep all his commandments,
he will then raise you high in praise and renown and glory
above all other nations he has made,
and you will be a people sacred to the LORD, your God,
as he promised" (Deuteronomy 26:17-19).
This call to enter into covenant with God through Jesus Christ opens up the possibility of an obedience that sets human freedom on fire (see Galations 5:1). Through it God offers the power to rise above all cultural expectations of goodness to attain to the perfection that is God's very life (Matthew 5:48).
Today's readings call us to "not be satisfied with mediocrity" (Pope John Paul II, Castel Gandolfo, August 25, 1981). Through them God the Father calls each of his sons and daughters to resist the truncated and unsatisfying vision of our lives for which contemporary western culture has settled. May our journey through this Lent draw us toward a more complete obedience, and with that to the "glorious freedom of the children of God" (Romans 8:21).
Today's Readings: Saturday, March 11th, 2006.
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