February 15, 2018

Lk 9:22-25

“The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” Then he said to them all, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.

What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?

New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. USCCB approved.

Facing Jesus’ suffering

Beginning in each season of Lent, I am often not prepared to encounter the suffering and sacrifice made by Jesus. The visual pictures of Christ dying for my sins is painful to witness and accept. Imagine the disciples trying to comprehend Jesus announcing the fate of the Son of Man. Disbelief, anxiety, fear – anything but accepting this reality of what is to come.

Can I embrace my sins as the cause of Christ’s suffering and death? Can I accept that our Lord is leading me, encouraging me to become closer to Him?

—Tim Freeman is a Major Gifts Officer at John Carroll University and is on the board of the Ignatian Spirituality Project.

Prayer

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ