This weekend’s second reading asks the question, “if God is for us…?” There is much going on in our world and in our lives that might cause us to ask where God is in all of it, what parts of our troubles we can blame on God, and wonder when God will decide to intervene. In his book, Night, Elie Wiesel reflects on a scene when he was in one of the German concentration camps. An emaciated boy was hung, but his body wasn’t heavy enough to choke him. So he just swung with the wind. Someone near Elie asked where God was, and Elie said that God was in the boy. What is it like to see God in our troubles, and to embrace His Presence so that we can experience God with us in our sufferings?
Our first reading for this Sunday uses the word “covenant” five times. It can be one of those words that we might have some sense of what it means. A more clear word is relationship. God created us out of love and fondly desires to have a loving relationship with everyone. Sadly, some of us in our formative years heard a lot about a God who could get angry, was inclined to judge us and would not restrain Himself from punishing us. This Lent is a great opportunity for us to spend some special times sitting with God and letting God say to us over and over that we are God’s beloved.
Some of us find a very good friend in Job, as he talks about himself in this weekend’s first reading (Job 7:1-4, 6-7). Typically, the first reading is selected because of its thematic tie-in with the Gospel. Given the oppressive religious atmosphere and the even more oppressive demands of the Roman Empire, all the people who came to or were brought to Jesus in the Gospel felt a lot like Job. We pray that, like Jesus, we can listen attentively to another’s pain without offering any solution or advice. Like Jesus, we do our best to let the love present within us be what energizes us to care as He did.