April 16, 2022
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we wait, entombed with Jesus. The waiting has a surreal sense every year as we commemorate this day with no liturgy of its own. Within our Holy Saturday prayer, there is a depth of meaning that eludes words. So, let us turn to poetry as we daily do:
Here are two poems that may help us explore the spiritual dimensions of Holy Saturday.
Music: God Rested – Andrew Peterson
April 15, 2022
Today, in in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray within the incomprehensible Love Who is Jesus Christ.
A most beautiful hymn from the Good Friday liturgy is the Popule Meus.
Popule Meus, also known as the ‘Improperia‘ or the ‘Reproaches,‘ is the hymn sung after the Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday. Christ reproaches the People, contrasting the innumerable favors God has bestowed upon them with the injuries He has received from their hands. Where God led them to the Chosen Land, the Peole led Him to the Cross. Where God gave a royal scepter, the People returned a crown of thorns.
This prayer focuses us on our own relationship with God. We too are Children of the Promise. How have we responded? How do we find ourselves as we kneel before the Cross?
The Trisagion prayer is an ancient chant repeated within the Popule Meus. It is a verse we can repeat as a mantra whenever we meditate on the Cross.
Ágios o Theos.
Ágios íschyros.
Ágios athánatos, eléison imas.
Holy God,
Holy Mighty One,
Holy Immortal One,
have mercy on us.
Poetry: Good Friday – Christina Rossetti
Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, as supper time falls slowly from east to west over the Earth, so will Christians worldwide seek communion with Christ and the believing community.
A great surge of intentional communion will join us in an irrepressible wave of faith. The evening skies will echo with the precious words that, despite whatever distances, gather us into one people in Christ:
Jesus took bread, and, after he had given thanks,
broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.”
In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying,
“This cup is the new covenant in my blood.
Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.
Our Gospel reminds us that there are two equally significant dimensions to a full understanding of Eucharist:
In these times of worldly suffering and war, that second dimension sustains us.
Eucharist is offered when we wash the feet of our sisters and brothers:
As Jesus leans to wash the feet of his disciples, so may we lean in service over our suffering world. Jesus asks us:
Do you realize what I, your Lord and Master, have done for you?
We do not realize fully, Lord, what You have done for us.
But we are daily learning a new depth of understanding.
The realization rises like a slow dawn over the shadows of our selfishness.
It is a sunrise which continues throughout our lives.
Please help us to rise with You no matter how the darkness weighs on us.Like the fragile bread and fluid wine which hide your Omnipotent Presence,
may we become holy nourishment and joy for one another
– a true and living memorial to your infinite act of love for us.
Prose Prayer: excerpts from Mass on the World – Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, SJ
Receive, O Lord, this all-embracing host which your whole creation, moved by your magnetism, offers you at this dawn of a new day.
This bread, our toil, is of itself, I know, but an immense fragmentation; this wine, our pain, is no more, I know, than a draught that dissolves. Yet in the very depths of this formless mass you have implanted — and this I am sure of, for I sense it — a desire, irresistible, hallowing, which makes us cry out, believer and unbeliever alike:
‘Lord, make us one.’
You have come down, Lord, into this day which is now beginning. But alas, how infinitely different in degree is your presence for one and another of us in the events which are now preparing and which all of us together will experience! In the very same circumstances which are soon to surround me and my fellow-men you may be present in small measure, in great measure, more and more or not at all.
Therefore, Lord, that no poison may harm me this day, no death destroy me, no wine befuddle me, that in every creature I may discover and sense you, I beg you: give me faith.
Music: Pange Lingua – Chant of the Mystics
Written by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century
English lyrics below
Sing, my tongue, the Saviour’s glory,
Of His Flesh, the mystery sing;
Of the Blood, all price exceeding,
Shed by our Immortal King,
Destined, for the world’s redemption,
From a noble Womb to spring.
Of a pure and spotless Virgin
Born for us on earth below,
He, as Man, with man conversing,
Stayed, the seeds of truth to sow;
Then He closed in solemn order
Wondrously His Life of woe.
On the night of that Last Supper,
Seated with His chosen band,
He, the Paschal Victim eating,
First fulfils the Law’s command;
Then as Food to all his brethren
Gives Himself with His own Hand.
Word-made-Flesh, the bread of nature
By His Word to Flesh He turns;
Wine into His Blood He changes:
What though sense no change discerns.
Only be the heart in earnest,
Faith her lesson quickly learns.
Down in adoration falling,
Lo, the sacred Host we hail,
Lo, o’er ancient forms departing
Newer rites of grace prevail:
Faith for all defects supplying,
When the feeble senses fail.
To the Everlasting Father
And the Son who comes on high
With the Holy Ghost proceeding
Forth from each eternally,
Be salvation, honor, blessing,
Might and endless majesty.
Amen.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, the betrayal of Jesus continues, as does his mounting courage to endure its consequences.
In our first reading, the experience of the prophet Isaiah foreshadows that of Jesus. We can hear Jesus praying in Isaiah’s words:
The Lord GOD is my help,
Isaiah 50:7-8
therefore I am not disgraced;
I have set my face like flint,
knowing that I shall not be put to shame.
He is near who upholds my right;
if anyone wishes to oppose me,
let us appear together.
Who disputes my right?
Let him confront me.
See, the Lord GOD is my help;
who will prove me wrong?
We hear Christ’s transcendent openness to the Father’s accompaniment:
Morning after morning
God opens my ear that I may hear;
And I have not rebelled,
have not turned back.
We hear Christ’s courage to face what life unfolds before him:
I gave my back to those who beat me,
my cheeks to those who plucked my beard;
My face I did not shield
from buffets and spitting.
We hear Christ’s utter commitment, despite suffering, to the Father’s Presence:
The Lord GOD is my help,
therefore I am not disgraced;
I have set my face like flint,
knowing that I shall not be put to shame.
As we pray with Jesus today, may we:
As our Jewish sisters and brothers will begin the Passover celebration this Friday, their rich faith heritage inspires us always to find God in the journey, no matter where it leads us.
In the Gospel’s Passover moment, Jesus walks toward the painful experience of Gethsemane. He invites us to come and receive the reassuring blessing of his Father even as the night shadows fall.
Poetry: The Garden of Gethsemane – by Boris Pasternak who won the Nobel Prize for Literature after writing Dr. Zhivago
Indifferently, the glimmer of stars
Lit up the turning in the road.
The road went round the Mount of Olives,
Below it the Kedron flowed.The meadow suddenly stopped half-way.
The Milky Way went on from there.
The grey and silver olive trees
Were trying to march into thin air.There was a garden at the meadow’s end.
And leaving the disciples by the wall,
He said: ‘My soul is sorrowful unto death,
Tarry ye here, and watch with Me awhile.’Without a struggle He renounced
Omnipotence and miracles
As if they had been borrowed things,
And now He was a mortal among mortals.The night’s far reaches seemed a region
Of nothing and annihilation. All
The universe was uninhabited.
There was no life outside the garden wall.And looking at those dark abysses,
Empty and endless, bottomless deeps,
He prayed the Father, in a bloody sweat,
To let this cup pass from His lips.Assuaging mortal agony with prayer,
He left the garden. By the road he found
Disciples, overcome by drowsiness,
Asleep spreadeagled on the ground.He wakened them: ‘The Lord has deemed you worthy
To live in My time. Is it worthiness
To sleep in the hour when the Son of Man
Must give Himself into the hands of sinners?’And hardly had He spoken, when a mob
Of slaves, a ragged multitude, appeared
With torches, sowards, and Judas at their head
Shaping a traitor’s kiss behind his beard.Peter with his sword resisted them
And severed one man’s ear. But then he heard
These words: ‘The sword is no solution.
Put up your blade, man, in its scabbard.Could not My Father instantly send down
Legions of angels in one thunderous gust?
Before a hair of my head was touched,
My enemies would scatter like the dust.But now the book of life has reached a page
Most precious and most holy. What the pen
Foretold in Scripture here must be fulfilled.
Let prophecy come to pass. Amen.The course of centuries is like a parable
And, passing, can catch fire. Now, in the name
Of its dread majesty, I am content
To suffer and descend into the tomb.I shall descend and on the third day rise,
And as the river rafts float into sight,
Towards My Judgement like a string of barges
The centuries will float out of the night.’
Music: I Come to the Garden Alone – Sean Clive
I come to the garden alone
while the dew is still on the roses,
And the voice I hear falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses
And He walks with me and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am his own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known
He speaks, and the sound of his voice is so sweet
The birds hush their singing,
And the melody that He give to me
Within my heart is to ringing.
And He walks with me and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am his own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known
I stay in the garden with Him,
Though the night around me is falling.
But He bids me go; through the voice of woe
His voice to me is calling.
And He walk with me and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our Gospel tells the sad story of Jesus’s betrayal by his closest friends.
“Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.”
The disciples looked at one another, at a loss as to whom he meant.
One of his disciples, the one whom Jesus loved,
was reclining at Jesus’ side.
So Simon Peter nodded to him to find out whom he meant.
He leaned back against Jesus’ chest and said to him,
“Master, who is it?”
Jesus answered,
“It is the one to whom I hand the morsel after I have dipped it.”
So he dipped the morsel and took it and handed it to Judas,
son of Simon the Iscariot.
After Judas took the morsel, Satan entered him.
Pope Francis, in his 2020 Palm Sunday homily, reflected on the depth of these betrayals:
Jesus suffered betrayal by the disciple who sold him and by the disciple who denied him. He was betrayed by the people who sang hosanna to him and then shouted: “Crucify him!” He was betrayed by the religious institution that unjustly condemned him and by the political institution that washed its hands of him.
We can think of all the small or great betrayals that we have suffered in life. It is terrible to discover that a firmly placed trust has been betrayed. From deep within our heart a disappointment surges up that can even make life seem meaningless. This happens because we were born to be loved and to love, and the most painful thing is to be betrayed by someone who promised to be loyal and close to us. We cannot even imagine how painful it was for God who is love.
These first three days of Holy Week are like the days in our lives when we know there is a wave of suffering coming but it hasn’t quite broken over us. Something just isn’t right in our bodies, minds, spirits, or in the world around us. In such times, the actual pain might be muted, but the fear, loneliness, anxiety and dark imaginations can be acute.
It’s hard to be with ourselves or with another in this kind of suffering. We see in our Gospel how hard it was for the disciples.
All one really has in such moments are the faith and trust that God ever abides with us. It is the kind of assurance Jesus had with the Father.
As we walk beside Jesus on this Fearful Tuesday, let us confide our sufferings, current or remembered, asking to be gracefully transformed by them. Let us listen to Jesus’s pain and heart-break, asking to be a source of comfort and love to Him.
With Jesus, may we carry in our prayer all those throughout the world suffering abandonment, fear, loss, or betrayal at this painful time.
Saint Judas – James Wright
When I went out to kill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.
Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.
Music: I Will Carry You – Sean Clive
You might hear this song in many ways. Perhaps Jesus comforts you with it. Or you might comfort Jesus in his escalating suffering. Or together, Jesus and you may sing it over a suffering world.
(Lyrics below)
I will carry you when you are weak.
I will carry you when you can’t speak.
I will carry you when you can’t pray.
I will carry you each night and day.
I will carry you when times are hard.
I will carry you both near & far.
I’ll be there with you whenever you fall.
I will carry you through it all.
My arms are wider than the sky,
softer than a little child,
stronger than the raging,
calming like a gentle breeze.
Trust in me to hold on tight because
I will carry you when you can’t stand.
I’ll be there for you to hold your hand.
And I will show you that you’re never alone.
I will carry you and bring you back home.
Not pain, not fear, not death, no nothing at all
can separate you from my love.
My arms and hands will hold you close.
Just reach out and take them in your own.
Trust in me to hold on tight.
I will carry you.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our Gospel places a fundamental question before us. How should the precious oil be used – tenderly poured out or reasonably saved? It is a question that challenges us to balance justice with mercy, reality with hope, law with passion. How are we being asked to open our alabaster jar?
This poem by Malcolm Guite may offer inspiration for our prayer:
Come close with Mary, Martha, Lazarus
so close the candles stir with their soft breath
and kindle heart and soul to flame within us,
lit by these mysteries of life and death.
For beauty now begins the final movement
in quietness and intimate encounter.
The alabaster jar of precious ointment
is broken open for the world’s true Lover.
The whole room richly fills to feast the senses
with all the yearning such a fragrance brings.
The heart is mourning but the spirit dances,
here at the very center of all things,
here at the meeting place of love and loss,
we all foresee, and see beyond the cross.
(Malcolm Guite: The Anointing at Bethany)
Jesus, give us courage to accompany you in your final journey. May your passion, death and resurrection bring us new life.
As we make this Holy Week journey, may we prove our love by our actions. May we live generously, hopefully, and gratefully in the Mercy of God.
Music: Pour My Love on You by Craig and Dean Phillips
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we begin a familiar journey.
In a warring, dystopian world, the rites of Holy Week offer us a reassuring pattern for our prayer. As we begin these rituals, we already know where we will joyfully finish. It is a feeling so opposite from our current global concerns which leave us questioning how peace and joy can be restored to the human family.
Through the solemnities of Holy Week, we are reminded that there is nothing we experience not already patterned in the Paschal Mystery. There is nothing we suffer or hope for not already etched on the heart of Jesus Christ.
These liturgies are an invitation to enter into that Sacred Heart, to place our experiences beside those of Jesus. No matter where we find ourselves on the journey, Jesus is with us:
These are profound sacred mysteries which invite us to sink into their depths and be renewed. Let’s be intentional about the time and practices we will give to this invitation.
We are invited into the Life and Passion of Jesus Who, in turn, wants to be with us in our experience of this journey. Each day, let us listen – let us become “obedient” (which means “listening”) – for the very personal whisper of grace in our souls. And even though we may pray alone, let us pray for the whole world suffering and rising with our beloved Savior.
I think today’s reading from Philippians is the most beautiful and pregnant passage in all of scripture. May it guide our prayer during this Holy Week when we all so hunger for God’s presence and healing.
Music: Philippians Hymn – John Michael Talbot
(Lyrics below)
And if there be therefore any consolation
And if there be therefore any comfort in his love
And if there be therefore any fellowship in spirit
If any tender mercies and compassion
We will fulfill His joy
And we will be like-minded
We will fulfill His joy
We can dwell in one accord
And nothing will be done
Through striving or vainglory
We will esteem all others better than ourselves
This is the mind of Jesus
This is the mind of Our Lord
And if we follow Him
Then we must be like-minded
In all humility
We will offer up our love
Though in the form of God
He required no reputation
Though in the form of God
He required nothing but to serve
And in the form of God
He required only to be human
And worthy to receive
Required only to give
This is the mind of Jesus
This is the mind of Our Lord
And if we follow Him
Then we must be like-minded
In all humility
We will offer up our love
In all humility
We will offer up our love
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, worlds are splitting apart, but the Word of God comes to heal them.
In our first reading, we share in the experience of the prophet Ezekiel.
Ezekiel and his wife lived during the Babylonian Captivity on banks of the Chenab River which is in modern day Iraq. He lived during the siege of Jerusalem in 589 BC. In Ezekiel’s day the northern kingdom had been conquered and destroyed 150 years earlier.
In other words, Ezekiel, like his contemporary Jeremiah, had his heart torn apart along with the homeland they cherished as God’s promise to them.
In today’s reading, which comes immediately after his vision of the Dry Bones, Ezekiel prophesies a message of hope and restoration to a fragmented and devastated nation.
In our Gospel, Jesus is the new Ezekiel. He stands in the midst of the bigger “nation” of all God’s Creation which has been fragmented by the failure to love. Like Ezekiel, Jesus offers a message of hope and restoration to sinners.
In this Gospel, Jesus himself is the “Temple” about to destroyed. The prophecy of its destruction is unwittingly delivered by the high priest Caiaphas:
Caiaphas,
John 11: 49-52
who was high priest that year,
said to the Pharisees and Sanhedrin,
“You know nothing,
nor do you consider that it is better for you
that one man should die instead of the people,
so that the whole nation may not perish.”
He did not say this on his own,
but since he was high priest for that year,
he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation,
and not only for the nation,
but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.
Within Christ’s new law of love, these “children of God” go far beyond the Jewish nation. They are you and me, and every other creature with whom we share this time and universe. The fragmentations which separate and alienate us are dissolved in the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Holy Week will begin tomorrow when all believers will intensify their desire to join Christ in his final journey to Resurrection, to understand our own lives anew in the power of Paschal Grace.
Let’s pray for one another, dear friends, for the grace we need to be deepened in the life of Jesus, and for that deepening to bless and heal our suffering world.
Poetry: The New Ezekiel – Emma Lazarus
What, can these dead bones live, whose sap is dried
By twenty scorching centuries of wrong?
Is this the House of Israel, whose pride
Is as a tale that’s told, an ancient song?
Are these ignoble relics all that live
Of psalmist, priest, and prophet? Can the breath
Of very heaven bid these bones revive,
Open the graves and clothe the ribs of death?
Yea, Prophesy, the Lord hath said. Again
Say to the wind, Come forth and breathe afresh,
Even that they may live upon these slain,
And bone to bone shall leap, and flesh to flesh.
The Spirit is not dead, proclaim the word,
Where lay dead bones, a host of armed men stand!
I ope your graves, my people, saith the Lord,
And I shall place you living in your land.
Music: Make Us One – featuring James Loynes. Written by Sally DeFord
(Lyrics below)
Lyrics
How shall we stand amid uncertainty?
Where is our comfort in travail?
How shall we walk amid infirmity,
When feeble limbs are worn and frail?
And as we pass through mortal sorrow,
How shall our hearts abide the day?
Where is the strength the soul may borrow?
Teach us thy way.
Chorus:
Make us one, that our burdens may be light
Make us one as we seek eternal life
Unite our hands to serve thy children well
Unite us in obedience to thy will.
Make us one! teach us, Lord, to be
Of one faith, of one heart
One in thee.
Then shall our souls be filled with charity,
Then shall all hate and anger cease
And though we strive amid adversity,
Yet shall we find thy perfect peace
So shall we stand despite our weakness,
So shall our strength be strength enough
We bring our hearts to thee in meekness;
Lord, wilt thou bind them in thy love?
(Repeat chorus)
Take from me this heart of stone,
And make it flesh even as thine own
Take from me unfeeling pride;
Teach me compassion; cast my fear aside.
Give us one heart, give us one mind
Lord, make us thine
Oh, make us thine!
(Repeat chorus)
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, as we inch closer to Holy Week, we meet both a very troubled Jeremiah and Jesus.
Jeremiah, the Old Testament mirror of Jesus’s sufferings, bewails the treachery even of his friends:
I hear the whisperings of many:
Jeremiah 20:10
“Terror on every side!
Denounce! let us denounce him!”
All those who were my friends
are on the watch for any misstep of mine.
That’s really raw, because you can get through almost anything in the company of true friends.
Jesus came as a Friend and hoped to find Friends of God by his ministry. And he did find many. But not all.
It takes some work to be a true friend of Jesus. Some didn’t have the courage, or generosity, or passion, or hopeful imagination to reach past their self-protective boundaries – to step into eternal life even as they walked the time-bound earth.
In today’s Gospel this band of resisters project their fears and doubts to the crowds around them. The evil sparks inflame the ready tinder of human selfishness. The mob turns on Jesus, spiritual misers scoffing at the generous challenge to believe.
Jesus pleads with them to realize what they are doing:
If I do not perform my Father’s works, do not believe me;
John 10:37-38
but if I perform them, even if you do not believe me,
believe the works, so that you may realize and understand
that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.
But Jesus and Jeremiah, though troubled, are grounded in God. Our Responsorial Psalm captures what might have been their silent prayer:
Poetry: The following transliteration of Psalm 18, composed by Christine Robinson, might help us to be with Jesus in his moment, and in our own moments of fear, anxiety, or doubt.
I open my heart to you, O God
for you are my strength, my fortress,
the rock on whom I build my life.
I have been lost in my fears and my angers
caught up in falseness, fearful, and furious
I cried to you in my anguish.
You have brought me to an open space.
You saved me because you took delight in me.
I try to be good, to be just, to be generous
to walk in your ways.
I fail, but you are my lamp.
You make my darkness bright
With your help, I continue to scale the walls
and break down the barriers that fragment me.
I would be whole, and happy, and wise
and know your love
Always.
Music: Overcome – Psalm 18 by James Block
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, Yahweh is very clear with Abram that he is now in a life-changing situation:
My covenant with you is this:
Genesis 17: 3-4
you are to become the father of a host of nations.
No longer shall you be called Abram;
your name shall be Abraham,
for I am making you the father of a host of nations.
Having witnessed how young fathers are upended by the news of impending fatherhood, I can’t even imagine what Abraham felt like when he heard this:
I will render you exceedingly fertile;
I will make nations of you;
kings shall stem from you.
But aside from the practical ramifications of God’s promise, what Abraham is invited to is a whole new outlook on the world. God lays out before him a vision of the ages, infinitely beyond the confines of Abraham’s current understanding.
It is an existence beyond time and human definition. It is the infinite place of God’s timelessness, where we all exist, but forget when we are born. Our lifetime is a spiritual journey back to remembrance.
In our Gospel, Jesus uses a rather cryptic phrase as he challenges his listeners to look beyond their circumscribed perspectives:
Amen, amen, I say to you,
John 8:51
whoever keeps my word will never see death….
Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day;
he saw it and was glad.
By fully embracing his covenant with God, Abraham saw beyond death. The vision of heaven was opened to him and he lived his life by its power. He lived then within the Day of the Lord, not within any small confined perspective.
Jesus offers us the same invitation. We can choose to see with God’s eyes, or with only our own. We can choose to live within God’s infinity, or in only our own earthbound borders.
In our current global situation, where some humans have lost the sense of anything beyond themselves, it may be a good time to remember the eternal character of our heart. It may be time to have a sit-down with God about our covenant, like the conversation God had with Abraham.
Poetry: The Unwavering Nomad – Jessica Powers
I love Abraham, that old weather-beaten
unwavering nomad; when God called to him
no tender hand wedged time into his stay.
His faith erupted him into a way
far-off and strange. How many miles are there
from Ur to Haran? Where does Canaan lie,
or slow mysterious Egypt sit and wait?
How could he think his ancient thigh would bear
nations, or how consent that Isaac die,
with never an outcry nor an anguished prayer?
I think, alas, how I manipulate
dates and decisions, pull apart the dark
dally with doubts here and with counsel there,
take out old maps and stare.
Was there a call after all, my fears remark.
I cry out: Abraham, old nomad you,
are you my father? Come to me in pity.
Mine is a far and lonely journey, too.
Music: In the Day of the Lord – M.D. Ridge
Refrain:
In the day of the Lord, the sun will shine
like the dawn of eternal day.
All creation will rise to dance and sing
the glory of the Lord!
1.
“And on that day will justice triumph,
on that day will all be free:
free from want, free from fear, free to live! Refrain
2.
Then shall the nations throng together
to the mountain of the Lord:
they shall walk in the light of the Lord! Refrain
3.
And they shall beat their swords to plowshares;
there will be an end to war:
one in peace, one in love, one in God! Refrain
4.
For Israel shall be delivered,
and the desert lands will bloom.
Say to all, “Do not fear. Here is your God!” Refrain
5.
And on that day of Christ in glory,
God will wipe away our tears,
and the dead shall rise up from their graves! Refrain
6.
O give us eyes to see your glory,
give us hearts to understand.
Let our ears hear your voice ’til you come! Refrain
Lavish Mercy 