Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent

Lectionary: 238

Foraging robins

For your name’s sake, O Lord, do not deliver us up forever, 
or make void your covenant. 
Do not take away your mercy from us, 
for the sake of Abraham, your beloved, 
Isaac your servant, and Israel your holy one....



When I was in college, those critical years when one is learning to think and forming philosophical attitudes that will last a lifetime, tradition was a suspect word. Change and revolution were in the air and tradition was the force of resistance. To add to the confusion, revolutionaries often insisted their changes were traditional; they intended to recover a forgotten past. 

I'd like to think I am still somewhat liberal in my approach to life, despite the rancor the word arouses in many quarters. But I have also learned a greater esteem for tradition. 
I learned it especially through the daily recitation of the psalms. These ancient prayers, introduced to me when I was 18 years old, have become my prayers. 

Their first appeal was the poetry and beauty of the words and phrases. Then, rather unexpectedly, some psalms began to express my own concerns. Psalm 139, especially, was my prayer as I pondered my vocation to the priesthood: 

O LORD, you have probed me, you know me: you know when I sit and stand; you understand my thoughts from afar. My travels and my rest you mark; with all my ways you are familiar. Even before a word is on my tongue, LORD, you know it all. Behind and before you encircle me and rest your hand upon me. Such knowledge is beyond me, far too lofty for me to reach.

As I grew more comfortable with the psalms I realized they don't have to express my particular angst today. Rather, they recall the suffering of the Messiah and of the whole Church. Reciting the psalms, I forget myself and pray with and for others. 

Azariah's prayer, in today's first reading, reminded me of that:

For your name’s sake, O Lord, do not deliver us up forever, or make void your covenant. Do not take away your mercy from us, for the sake of Abraham, your beloved,Isaac your servant, and Israel your holy one....

One of the aims of daily prayer, besides finding personal strength and consolation, is to lose and find oneself in the history of God's people. Despite the astonishing changes of modern times, changes we have seen within our few years, not that much has changed since the prehistoric days of the Bible. 

There is still hunger and thirst, poverty and prisons, oppression and injustice. Marital infidelity remains with us, as does deception and murders. Even slavery persists, albeit underground, in the most civilized countries. 

Human beings still look to the heavens for mercy when we do not find it among ourselves. If there are many who enjoy the good life, many more pay the price of others' wealth. On which side of the thin blue line -- the police and our security services -- does justice lie? Do our armed forces protect the just from the unjust, or the unjust from their just deserts?

They listen with their feet!

The Lord hears the cry of the poor, so the Psalmist (34) says. And the Lord hears our prayer for the poor as we pray the psalms, whether they are the poor in fourth century B.C.E. Israel, the oppressed of modern America; or the oppressed of some distant future. 

As the servants in today's gospel appealed to their master for the mistreated debtor, so do we pray to God for the unjustly treated today. And the Lord blesses us for standing with them.