Reflections on the Lenten texts from Matthew and John

The theme for these Lent materials, “Marvelous in our eyes,” is paradoxical. A call to rejoice in our salvation sounds good. To recover the awe and wonder of our encounter with the living Christ is truly marvellous. But in my experience, spiritual growth most often happens in times of struggle and difficulty. I have more often kicked and screamed my way through my own conversions than regarded them with wonder and joy.

To be sure, after the fact, I can appreciate that I have come to know God better and to be more trusting. I can recognize that my heart and mind have been stretched, that I am the better for the stretching, and that God has been at work forming, reforming, and conforming me in the ways of love. But the journey through the wilderness toward seeing the transformative power of God as marvelous has certainly required the use of many metaphorical corrective lenses—which, of course, is quite the point!

I take comfort, therefore, in the gospel stories for this season of Lent—stories of people who also struggled to see the transformative power of God’s love as good news in their lives.

The first person who struggles to understand God’s activity in his life as good news is none other than Jesus himself. We often dismiss the texts that portray Jesus in turmoil—we think the temptations were not real temptations, or that the prayer he prayed before his execution was not a real prayer for deliverance. We let our own understandings of perfection and divinity get in the way of reading what is there.

As Matthew 4:1-11 describes it in the text for the first Sunday of Lent, the scene in the wilderness is Jesus’ attempt to come to terms with his baptism as the beloved Son. Does he, as the Son of God, have the right to act like God—to turn stones into bread to feed the people, to assert his superiority over even the temple, to command all the kingdoms of the world? Or will he understand his baptism to mean he has the responsibility to obey God, to entrust himself and his earthly purpose absolutely to the one who judges justly? There must have been times in those forty days when he struggled to define how he would use the power of his identity, when he wondered whether God’s activity in his life was marvellous.

Nicodemus, the elderly man who comes to Jesus by night, has a different sort of wilderness experience. His wilderness is a desert of the mind, a discussion with Jesus that defies the formal rules of logical reasoning as well as the formal rules of the organized religion by which he has lived his long life. Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a leader of his people, a teacher of Israel—who still does not understand what God is doing in the world. For all his stature in public life he still struggles to fathom God’s love for the world. Understanding the magnitude of that love is a grace that only comes from above, as elusive as the desert wind blowing through the night of his conversation with Jesus.

The woman of Samaria, who comes upon Jesus at Jacob’s well, is lost in a tangle of relationships that is depleting her. Some of the mess in which she finds herself is her inheritance as a human being—bitter racism and formidable sexism. Some of the mess is likely an unfortunate combination of desperation and sexuality. But at the well she finds someone who takes her seriously as an intelligent woman and offers her living water, water for living in and through the struggle. Her relational desert fades in a testimony that brings her neighbours also to draw from this unique well.

The story of the man born blind in John 9 is as much a story about the religious community’s trouble with sight as it is about the blind man’s impairment. It is a wilderness of confusion about what constitutes real vision. In the end the man born blind receives both outer and inner comprehension of the most important reality—the man from God. But the religious leaders persist in their own struggle, their own peculiar wilderness—by denying that they are lost at all.

Lazarus and his family are wandering in the most desolate desert of all—the wilderness inhabited by illness, death and grief. It is a place in human experience that Jesus finds deeply disturbing and he cries. Belief and unbelief, hope and suspicion, pleading and recrimination, love and anger are all part of this most common and most strange human desert. There in the cave of death near Bethany, Jesus overcomes that last desolation—a giving of life, a miracle that brings joy and relieved belief to Lazarus’ family but also rouses such an opposition to his ministry that he is forced into hiding.

The last gospel text for Lent, the enigmatic journey from Bethphage to Jerusalem, has its own struggle, its own desert of irony and illusion. The king rides on lowly farm animals. The crowds processing with him acclaim him, and the crowds in the city do not know what to make of him—they are perturbed. Triumph, joy, and acclamation are underlain with doom as Jesus comes home to God’s most holy city, where he will face his own most intense struggle and be put to death.

We do rejoice in the different aspects of salvation found in these stories, even the multi-layered triumphal entry. The good news is that God is there in the midst of human struggle. God’s activity in the wilderness of human pain and pretension is marvellous in our eyes—not an easy marvel, perhaps, and not one that we can always embrace with eagerness. But the desert—with all its hardship, scarcity, difficult life and death choices—is also a place of rare and delicate beauty. It is the place where God meets human need most emphatically. It is the place where the human heart and the divine heart come together in the love that gives life out of death. It is marvellous in our eyes!
—Mary H. Schertz

The author teaches New Testament at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana. Reprinted from the winter 2004/05 issue of Leader.

Lenten reflections

Seeking an 'acceptable' fast...

Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Isaiah 58.3b-7

It has been three days now since we returned from a visit to Gaza and I have been unable to stop thinking about it. Images of shelled neighbourhoods and children playing in the rubble of their demolished homes continue to fill my mind. The sounds of nightly shelling and explosions that made sleep difficult continue to distract me. The faces of the people whose lives we entered only for a brief time, and the stories of their dispossession and death they implored us to hear, continue to consume me.

“Tell our story…. Please, tell our story.”

We had the privilege of visiting several families living in the Khan Younis refugee camp with our friends from the Culture and Free Thought Association—a group that MCC partners with that works with children and women.

On the western edge of Khan Younis, we visited that area of the refugee camp where only days before 17 families had been made homeless by the Israeli military’s incursion into the camps. Khan Younis is only one of the many refugee camps that the Israeli military invades on a regular basis, in response to claims of “terrorist” attacks on illegal settlements and military outposts in Gaza.

People, mostly children, were wandering through the remnants of what was a large neighbourhood and market area. A small group was sitting in front of one of the only homes left standing. When they saw us they immediately began to describe the events of the last few days. One man brought us into the home; a group was sitting in front of where—only two hours before we arrived—an Israeli missile had crashed through the roof of the room where a two-year-old had been sleeping. She was not injured, nushkur Allah.

We looked out the back door of the house to see the Israeli watchtower a short distance away, but not for too long, as our host feared more shooting if they saw us looking too intently in that direction.

“Tell our story—wait, just one more minute,” he said to the young woman from the Culture and Free Thought Association who was helping us with translation, while trying to move us along as shooting in the distance grew louder from the checkpoint where we had been only 20 minutes before. “Just one thing you must do for me,” he said, looking back at us and peering straight into our eyes. “Please, tell our story.”

Christ has died. Whence the resurrection?
I have been sitting here trying to articulate some relevant reflection upon Palestinian experiences here for a Lenten audience. But after this experience in Gaza, any reflection upon Lent or any other religious ritual or season seems difficult to undertake. Maybe even a little trivial. Definitely irrelevant if it does not engage both myself and the reader in a critical reflection on “Christian praxis” when it comes to engaging the injustices here.

Lent is often seen as a time of sombre reflection, of humility, of penance and repentance. Lent is often associated with self-denial, especially in the form of fasting. And the writer of Isaiah spoke strongly of the Lord’s requirements when the people of God participate in such rituals.

We are told that any fasting that only serves our self-interest, or contributes to the oppression of the weak and the marginalized, is not only what God does not want, but what God abhors. Only the fast that moves beyond empty, conscience-soothing ritual and steps into the action of working towards the liberation of all people from oppression—oppression that we are often the beneficiaries of—is acceptable. Indeed, it is demanded.

All our beliefs will not absolve us of our sins.

“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these … you did it to me…. And just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (Matthew 25:31-46).

So this Lenten season, we will fast and we will pray. But Gaza will still be under attack. Beit Lahiya’s children will continue to be slaughtered. The shelling will continue to deny Khan Younis her sleep.

During this season of Lent, if we cannot respond to their cries, if we cannot make them our own, if the starting point of any Lenten reflection is not “My God, my God, why have you forsaken them? Us?”—then all of our prayers, our fasts, our rituals are not only a nefarious exercise of veiled self-interest but an active participation in the crucifixion of the Christ we only know in the children, women and men of Gaza.

Christ has died. Whence the resurrection?

––Tim Seidel

The writer is a MCC peace development worker in Palestine

Lenten gospel texts: Reflection questions Lent 1: Matthew 4:1-11—What are the struggles with the concept of obedience? Are we tempted to take power or are we willing to designate our power to God? Is the concept of obedience problematic because we have been forced to obey our earthly authorities in damaging ways? Lent 2: John 3:1-17— How do we meet God in our minds? Are we willing, like Nicodemus, to ask our honest questions, no matter how others may perceive us? Are we willing, also, to let faith push the boundaries of our beloved rationality? Lent 3: John 4:5-42—Are we willing to be transparent before God with the tangled web of our relationships? How does our contentment or discontentment with who we are in relation to others lead us to greater faith, to greater joy in our salvation? Lent 4: John 9:1-41— What perceptual illusion, blurred vision or downright blindness are we clinging to unnecessarily or unhelpfully? What is true vision? How do we distinguish between correct and incorrect sight? What are the metaphorical corrective lenses that we can seek? Lent 5: John 11:1-45—What are the resurrections that are being called out of the deaths in our own lives? How do anger and love resonate in our lives as we deal with the gifts and losses of life? Lent 6: Matthew 21:1-11—Are we offering our hosannas to God with appropriate awareness of the upside down character of this King Jesus? Can we relax and enjoy, and maybe even chortle at, the ironies of serving this humble master?

We seek you in the desert, God

We come, leaving behind our cushioned recliners,
our multileveled excuses,
our distractions of mind and media.

We come to these wild places,
where the air is thin and the beauty stark,
where the winds are high and rocks jagged.

Here, in this untamed landscape, we can but honour
Your vast indifference toward
all that for which we strive: status, wealth, power.

Here in this wilderness, we can but be who we are,
in all our human frailty,
and place ourselves more truly in Your care.

In Jesus’ name,
Amen.

—Mary H. Schertz

Hope Mennonite writes
Lenten letters

Winnipeg, Man.—During Lent we prepare ourselves for Holy Week when Jesus was tortured and killed. Last year, Hope Mennonite Church, Winnipeg, used this time of preparation to participate in an Amnesty International letter-writing campaign in support of people suffering injustice, torture and facing death. Participating in the campaign raised awareness and gave new insights into the plight of the many who suffer in this world, so the congregation is planning the same involvement this year for Lent.

Amnesty International suggests that each participating church form a group that will meet weekly during Lent to write letters, e-mails, or faxes on behalf of those who are suffering injustice, torture and facing the possibility of death. One common practice is to meet after church on a Sunday morning.

At Hope Mennonite Church, a coordinator was appointed to receive the up-to-date e-mails sent out from Amnesty each week. Tables and chairs were set up in the entry area of the church for members to gather and write letters. They were provided with clear information, instructions, writing paper, pens, envelopes and stamps.

Amnesty provides weekly suggestions for letter content, although participants can choose their own letters from the Amnesty website or from the Amnesty newsletter The Activist.

“Letter writing, prayer and conscious actions not only encourage people living with oppression and threat of death, but also transform individuals and congregations into the image of Christ,” says Norm Voth, director of Evangelism and Service for Mennonite Church Manitoba. “God’s desire is for peace and reconciliation for all people.”

For more information, contact Amnesty International at www.amnesty.ca or contact Tom Collings in Winnipeg at 1-204-772-2892 or tomjulie@mts.net.
—Evelyn Rempel Petkau

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