Readings: Hosea 5:15-6:6; Psalm 50:3-4, 18-21; Luke 18:9-14.
Getting older I find that I need to take greater care in walking, for fear of falling on stairs and slipping on escalators, having to keep an eye on the elevation of the ground, especially on paths that are not even and broken in parts. Scripturally speaking pathways and steps, the state of the ground are familiar images for the spiritual life. Perhaps the most familiar form is found in the Psalm which proclaims – ‘Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path’ (119:105). The importance of walking and the way that is walked are hardly surprising given the centrality of the metaphor of journey in the Bible. Beginning with Abram’s departure from home and the journeys of Israel, through Mary’s trip to the hill country to rejoice with Elizabeth and Zechariah and announce her own good news and Paul’s many journeys throughout today’s Mediterranean, travel is a theological motif for mission.
In the Preface to the Lenten retreat he preached to Pope John Paul II in the presence of the Roman curia in 1983 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) stated ‘In preparing the retreat I endeavored to assemble all the components of the liturgical texts which suggest the theme of a journey, of being on the way’. He also stated that the ‘readings are taken from the Cycle for Year C’, the Gospel for which is Luke with its leitmotif of journey, especially that of Jesus to Jerusalem. Not surprisingly the title of the collected Lenten talks is Journey to Easter.[1] (A fuller theological treatment of the theme of journey would take into account Jesus’ self-identification in the Gospel of John : ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life’ (14:6). Michael Taylor’s commentary on this verse is both magisterial and majestic: ‘To say that Jesus is the Way and that he is the Truth means his words and deeds truly reveal the Father. Jesus has also been sharing with believers that which he reveals: life was given, light was given; soon love will be given. This indicates that Jesus is sharer as well as revealer; he is thus the Way to Life as well as the Way to Truth.’[2]
Hosea makes great headway with the metaphor of journey, of travel. Yesterday we heard ‘Provide yourself with words and come back to the Lord’, ‘For the ways of the Lord are straight, and the virtuous walk in them’. Today we read ‘Come. Let us return to the Lord’, the constant call
to conversion which is paralleled by the promise ‘we shall live in his presence’. God’s going out is never in doubt, his coming ‘as certain as the dawn’, for the mission of God is mercy, manifest in the hope that the Lord ‘will bandage our wounds’. This is the mission of the church, to be a field hospital, Pope Francis’ proposal put to the church in his teaching and travels.
The Gospel reading from Luke presents ‘two men who went up to the Temple to pray’. There they adopt different attitudes and articulate two different approaches, one praying to himself and the other asking for God’s mercy. Their travel to the Temple, their journeys there reflecting how their fundamental options could not be further apart, one relying on himself and his hubris, the other relying on God and revealing his humility. The response of the tax-collectors resembles the return of the prodigal son earlier in the Gospel of Luke – ‘So he set off and went to his father’. Having broken away in his earlier departure, his descent into penury brought him through grace that he would be better off at least by heading home, where he was received with open arms and a celebration which exceeded even his greatest expectation. Both the tax-collector and the younger son repent, reversing their refusal and rejection of covenantal relations. The Liturgy of the Word in Lent provides us with words to look at how we are going and where we hope to get to.
Fr Kevin O’Gorman SMA
[1] Pope Benedict XVI, Journey to Easter – Spiritual Reflections for the Lenten Season, New York, Crossroad, 1987, 10.
[2] Michael J. Taylor, S.J., JOHN the different GOSPEL – A Reflective Commentary, New York: Alba House, 1983, 170-171.