Third Sunday of Lent – 03/03/2013
I’d say it’s a reasonable assumption to make, that a first reading of the Scripture passages this week-end will reinforce the thinking of the ‘God-will-get-you’ brigade. This mindset is for me, apart from being totally wrong, extraordinary in the ease with which some people are prepared to go along with it. It’s almost as if it’s easier for them to Fear God, than it is to Love God. They seem to settle for fear rather than seek for forgiveness.
Of course the real killer-line that re-inforces how ‘right’ they are! is the Gospel text ‘unless you do penance you will all likewise perish’!! It seldom seems to dawn on this brigade that ‘Love casts out fear’(I Jn 4:18), so if we believe in the revelation of God as Love – why on earth (or beyond!) should we go unquestioningly with the doom and gloom interpretation of Sacred Scripture.
Why not look deeper at that phrase ‘unless you do penance you will all likewise perish’. That’s the English translation of the Greek text that survives using the word “Metanoia”. Metanoia is the call to repentance, understood as “turning around”. Turning around from the direction in which we are facing, if that is going to lead us over the cliff-edge of purpose, of contentment, of meaning of fulfillment. ‘I came’, Jesus said (Jn 10:10) ‘so that you might have life and have it to the full’. But just like the ending in that famous Thelma and Louise movie of years ago, unless you ‘turn-around’ (Metanoia) girls and take your foot off the pedal you’re heading over the edge!!
In thinking too of the lifeless eyes and jaded faded expressions of so many in those Amsterdam ‘Coffee Shops’ (some coffee!) who do nothing but smoke pot all day. Unless they ‘turn around’ they’ll more than likely ‘be got’ too, but it wont be by God, it’ll be by themselves! In many ways we can be the authors of our own misfortune on so many different levels, but we always like to be in a position to blame someone else, don’t we?
We’re Popeless this week-end, an extraordinary moment in the history of the Church – a Pope ‘resigning’!! A decision that will have a bearing too on his successors. In many ways though, just all politics is local, so too is all church!! Of course it’s good and real to be linked into a centre that is so steeped in history, in frailty, in wisdom, and in faith, always trying to help its Faithful to be even more so, by “turning round” if we’re headed in the opposite direction. In other words do ourselves a favour.