By Fr Antony Christy, SDB –
THE WORD IN LENT – Friday, Third week
March 08, 2024 – Hosea 14: 2-10; Mark 12: 28-34
Through the desert, God leads us to freedom. When we say God leads us, it is an internal experience of conversion. Yes, the Lord leads us from within. We are led to that point of return, the point when our hearts take a definitive turn and decide to return to the Lord, forever in love! The Word today presents to us this experience, from God’s own point of view.
Listening to the first reading today (or reading it) we would have come across the term “come back” at least thrice and a sense of that term for a few more times. That is the repeated call of God to us during the season of Lent – come back! Return! Although the Lord knows how far we have gone from the Lord, in our thinking, our values and our choices, the Lord does not make it a cause of rejection. That is the merciful God that we have! Instead, the Lord speaks to our souls, our hearts, our minds – “I am the Lord your God, listen to my warning!” says God.
Returning to the Lord, begins from knowing or recognising that call. All of us know what it means. We see that scribe today questioning Jesus about the first of all commandments… not that he wanted to know, because he knew it already. “Well said” he says to Jesus! Jesus did not need that acknowledgement, but he had already given his teaching, linking that love of God to the love of one’s neighbour! The scribe recognises that newness in Jesus’ teaching too! He was indeed a clever man, and he deserved an appreciation from Jesus and Jesus gives it to him dutifully.
Knowing that we need to love God above all and that loving the other is the best way to love God, is the way to salvation, the way to the promised freedom – to which God leads. But knowing alone is not enough. Jesus was very precise when he affirmed that scribe – ‘you are not far from the kingdom of God’… however, you are not yet there! That is the message to us too: not enough to know! We know a lot and we speak about it a lot. But that is not enough. We would only come close to the Reign, but we would not enter it yet!
We can enter the Reign, Jesus reminds us today, only if we make that decision to definitively return to the Lord in love. In loving God above all and in loving our brothers and sisters, we will experience how God leads us, towards that decision to return, towards that freedom of the Reign.
Fr Antony Christy is a Salesian Priest from 2005, who has a Masters in Philosophy (specialisation in Religion) and a Masters in Theology (Specialisation in Catechetics). He holds doctoral research in Theology at Salesian Pontifical University, Rome. Walking with the Young towards a World of Peace and Dialogue is the passion that fires him on.