for April 4
Saturday in the Fifth Week of Lent

Lately, every time I read the bible, I think it’s talking about the world falling apart. I know I’m projecting my own situation onto the text! My world IS falling apart. So not surprisingly I’m seeking answers in the bible. How about you?

In today’s reading, Ezekiel’s world, too, really is falling apart. His country is in the midst of a disastrous military defeat. His people are being dragged into exile along with the complete disintegration of his religious institutions and national culture. He tries to resolve his crisis by conjuring up a vision of redemption and restoration. Like so many stories in the bible, we can ask if this is wishful thinking or stubborn faith—take your pick. Yet what impresses me most about Ezekiel’s vision is that the focus is not on himself nor on his people, but on what God is doing—or will do. The LORD God, Ezekiel says, will gather the people up—from exile in Babylon and wherever else they have wandered off to—and bring them all together again, re-establishing them in their own homeland, but this time as a reformed people who can serve as a beacon of hope to all the peoples of the earth.

Quite a vision! I read this kind of language in the present circumstances and I feel as though it’s written for our world today. I hear people saying that when this is all over, we will come together as a reformed America, correcting so many of the faults that we formerly accepted up to now—very much like Ezekiel’s vision. And having exhausted myself in the present crisis reading about all the things we can do, and what the government should do, and the solutions that science hopefully can discover, I have to turn my focus more to what the Lord must do, the kind of trust in God’s faithful covenant love that Ezekiel believed was so powerful. 

Wishful thinking? Maybe. But maybe it’s true—and then call it faith. A sign that it may be a true and valid faith is the effect it has on us as a people, making all of us more ready to do the right thing, to submit to the things the we can’t change and courageous in meeting present challenges, empathetic towards the hurts that people must endure and resourceful in alleviating others’ suffering whenever possible.

Whoever chose today’s readings certainly felt that today’s gospel passage somehow goes along with Ezekiel’s vision. Clearly one connection is the evangelist’s comment about Jesus, that Jesus was “to gather into one the dispersed children of God.” Just like the LORD God in Ezekiel’s vision. But I see another connection.

Getting back to my idea about the world falling apart, I think we need to welcome the high priest Caiaphas into our club. Caiaphas certainly felt his world was falling apart—as indeed it did just a few short decades later. “. .  the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation,” Caiaphas predicts. So Caiaphas hatches a plan to save his world. It’s a disastrous plan: kill Jesus. That should stand as a terrible warning to us—about what not to do. If our world stands on the brink, we can do all sorts of things that will surely lead to ruin by embracing hate and selfishness and vindictive retribution in all its forms.
—Walter F. Modrys SJ

Today’s readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website.