Third Sunday of Lent
March 3, 2024
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/030324-YearB.cfm
… We proclaim Christ crucified, …
1 Corinthians 1: 22-25
… Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom,
and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
This is a great mystery of our faith: that the all-powerful One chose to redeem us by assuming our human weakness, suffering torment, and dying an ignominious death.
When my three-year-old grand-niece visited our convent, she enjoyed walking through the huge motherhouse pointing out every statue of Our Lady of Mercy.
With each discovery she would pronounce the title: “Jeezie and his Mommy”. At the end of a very long corridor, we came to a life-size wooden carving of Jesus Crucified. Little Claire studied it, looked up at me and asked, “Who is that?”.
I simply said, “I don’t know” because her sweet little heart could not bear to learn, or to possibly understand, what happened to her “Jeezie”.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
Lent is the time to deepen our understanding of what happened to Jesus because of the “foolishness of God”. That Omnipotent Love suffered, died, and rose for us so that we would understand and embrace the meaning of Love in our own lives.
Let’s pray today for a fuller awareness that our lives are a continuing participation in the Great Love. Let us use these Lenten days to find the pattern of the Cross in our world, and to look within it for the Light of the Resurrection.
Poetry: The Foolishness of God – Luci Shaw
Perform impossibilities
or perish. Thrust out now
the unseasonal ripe figs
among your leaves. Expect
the mountain to be moved.
Hate parents, friends, and all
materiality. Love every enemy.
Forgive more times than seventy-
seven. Camel-like, squeeze by
into the kingdom through
the needle’s eye. All fear quell.
Hack off your hand, or else,
unbloodied, go to hell.
Thus the divine unreason.
Despairing now, you cry
with earthy logic – How?
And I, your God, reply:
Leap from your weedy shallows.
Dive into the moving water.
Eyeless, learn to see
truly. Find in my folly your
true sanity. Then Spirit-driven,
run on my narrow way, sure
as a child. Probe, hold
my unhealed hand, and
bloody, enter heaven.
Music: The Cross is Foolishness – John Michael Talbot (lyrics below)
CHORUS:
The Cross is foolishness to those who perish
But for us it has become the wisdom of God
The Cross is foolishness to those who perish
But for us it is salvation and power from God
Some look for miracles, some look for wisdom
But we preach only Jesus crucified
It seems absurdity, it seems so foolish
But to us it is the wisdom of God
(CHORUS)
(CHORUS)
Eye has never seen, ear has never heard
Nor has it dawned on the limits of the mind
What God has surely prepared
For those who love Him
He reveals this wisdom through the Spirit of God
Lavish Mercy 