THURSDAY OF THE FOURTH WEEK IN LENT - 2024

DAILY HOLY MASS READINGS

God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son:
everyone who believes in him has eternal life. JN 3:16

EXODUS 32:7-14 ©

My Soul's Beloved,

Even though Your anger burns against us O Lord You relent for You are a God of Love and until we miserable sinners are alive we can count on Your mercy. But this is my great sorrow Beloved, that those we love and pray for may die in their sins and will be condemned to be separated from You eternally. How can I bear this agony, my Lord and my God? My heart is broken because perhaps we failed as parents in safeguarding the souls entrusted to us and now, as adults, they have strayed far from the path of righteousness.  

The people of Israel were quick to forget how You saved them with mighty signs and miracles and brought them out of exile and slavery to freedom and they made for themselves and worshipped as their deliverer a molten calf. Your righteous anger as well as the anger of Moses burned against them. They deserved to be destroyed, to be annihilated, Moses knew this yet he stood in the breach and pleaded for their lives.

The Lord said to Moses, ‘I can see how headstrong these people are! Leave me, now, my wrath shall blaze out against them and devour them; of you, however, I will make a great nation.’
But Moses pleaded with the Lord his God. ‘Lord,’ he said ‘why should your wrath blaze out against this people of yours whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with arm outstretched and mighty hand? Why let the Egyptians say, “Ah, it was in treachery that he brought them out, to do them to death in the mountains and wipe them off the face of the earth”? Leave your burning wrath; relent and do not bring this disaster on your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, your servants to whom by your own self you swore and made this promise: I will make your offspring as many as the stars of heaven, and all this land which I promised I will give to your descendants, and it shall be their heritage for ever.’

God did hear the prayer of intercession that Moses made on behalf of His people. He did relent and did not bring on His people the disaster He had threatened.

You O Lord, are the new Moses, You stand in the breach our Mediator, and plead for us night and day before the throne of God. This is why I hope that in the end not just I, O Lord, but I and my entire household will be saved. I believe, I adore, I hope, and I trust, and I love You, my Lord and my God and You will not put me to shame. For no one who hopes in You will be put to shame.

PSALM 105(106):19-23 ©

They fashioned a calf at Horeb

and worshipped an image of metal,
exchanging the God who was their glory
for the image of a bull that eats grass.

They forgot the God who was their saviour,

who had done such great things in Egypt,
such portents in the land of Ham,
such marvels at the Red Sea.

For this he said he would destroy them,

but Moses, the man he had chosen,
stood in the breach before him,
to turn back his anger from destruction.

O Lord, remember me out of the love you have for your people.

JOHN 5:31-47 ©

My Soul's Beloved,

Reading and reflecting on today's Gospel of John all that You said to the Jews on that particular day over two millennia ago, nothing much has changed in this present age. Every word that You spoke against the Jews then is true of Christians today - lukewarm, tepid, neither hot nor cold and this is why You will vomit us out of Your mouth. At least the Jews of the time could be excused for they had not yet witnessed the entire work of redemption embracing the entire spectrum of Your life beginning with Your lowly birth, life, passion, horrendous crucifixion, and culminating with Your glorious resurrection and triumph over death. 

 The testimony of the Triune God during Your 33 years on earth is greater than any human testimony, we need no other from where we stand today. Yet O Lord never in the history of time are we living in such decadent and satanic times. If Your righteous anger swept across the globe we would all be consigned to the darkest pit in hell for eternity. Many in the world arrogantly call themselves atheists even though Your finger is evident in all creation. Many proudly affirm that they are idolaters who bow before artifacts made by human hands and they offer these deaf, dumb, and blind artifacts and worship them.  Those of us who identify as Catholics and Christians are no better - we cherry-pick what we choose to believe and reject what is uncomfortable or those divine and doctrinal teachings that we refuse to conform to.

What You said to the Jews listening to You applies to many of us who are ill-formed in the faith. Proud, haughty, and spiritually blind making us unteachable even though 2000 years of unbroken doctrinal teaching is safeguarded and the Sacred Deposit of faith is handed down from one generation to the next. We would rather be fed by ill-formed teachers and accept their erroneous teaching as infallible trues. 

‘You study the scriptures,
believing that in them you have eternal life;
now these same scriptures testify to me,
and yet you refuse to come to me for life!’

How apt this is Beloved for all those many, many splinter groups who are blind leaders of the blind, and yet their followers froth at the mouth in their derision and outright rejection of revealed doctrine which is both Oral and Written comprising a whole. 

‘I have come in the name of my Father
and you refuse to accept me;
if someone else comes in his own name
you will accept him.
How can you believe,
since you look to one another for approval
and are not concerned
with the approval that comes from the one God?’

Let not those who are the bosom of Holy Mother Church take salvation for granted, Lord, rather grant us the grace to work out our salvation with fear and trembling for we count on Your goodness and mercy and not on our merits. The works of the apostles, the early Church Fathers, and the doctors of the Church will be the ones accusing us for we refused to embrace revealed Truth in all its fullness, grandeur, goodness, and beauty.

‘Do not imagine that I am going to accuse you before the Father:
you place your hopes on Moses,
and Moses will be your accuser.
If you really believed him
you would believe me too,
since it was I that he was writing about;
but if you refuse to believe what he wrote,
how can you believe what I say?’