Thursday, April 4
Readings: EX 32:7-14; JN 5:31-47
In the first reading, God tells Moses that the Israelites are a “stiff necked people” and that God intends to send wrath upon the people. Instead of fidelity to God, the people have made a calf of molten gold and now look to it for help and guidance. God is not pleased. Moses bargains with God and reminds God that the Israelites were not brought out of Egypt only to be exterminated in the desert! So God relents.
In the gospel, we hear about Jesus’ frustration with the people for not listening to him – even though he’s speaking for and working on behalf of God. He can’t seem to understand why it is that people will reject his message and rely instead on other things that just are not a true sense of power. He hearkens back to the time of Moses and says to them, “…if you had believed Moses, you would have believed me…But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” The people persist in their disbelief.
Today is the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. As the band U2 sings, “early evening, April 4, shot rings out in the Memphis sky…” On that day our country lost one of the greatest leaders we had known.
Through the course of his life, King became more and more disenchanted with the ability of America – but especially white America – to fully embrace the message that he was bringing. Moreover, King saw what he was saying as being directly tied to the biblical mandate for justice let alone to the ideals of the founding documents of this country. It raised serious questions for him about democracy and Christianity as they are practiced in the United States.
In his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963) King said, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people….Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men [and women] willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy…Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”
My sense is that King would share Jesus’ view that white America, in particular, has been a stiff-necked people more interested in worshipping false gods than practicing authentic faith. And he said that the “giant triplets” of racism, militarism and extreme materialism all go hand in hand in this equation.
Just as God wanted the Israelites to repent of their sins, so, too, did King want America to repent.
What would it mean to repent of racism, militarism and extreme materialism? What would need to change in our lives? How might our Lenten disciplines contribute to this repentance?