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Reflections
for Sunday, March 11, 2012
The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God
is stronger than human strength - this phrase from the First Letter to the
Corinthians should speak to our hearts in this time of Lent. We want to
follow God and that will make us fools. Human wisdom is so opposed to the
wisdom of the Gospel that there are many efforts today to make our human
understanding more important than the Word of God.
Surely in the past fifty years we have seen a deeper understanding of the
Word of God in many ways. We have also seen a huge disrespect for the Word
of God grow in our Western cultures. We have seen strong and intense
movements to play down the Word of God or to speak of it as so conditioned
by the culture of its own time that it has very little meaning left today.
We no longer ask if our actions are in accord with God's Word, but only if
something makes us happy. All of our actions are fine as long as we don't
hurt anyone else. The ethics and morality of modern culture are dictated
by public opinion, not by the Word of God.
In this context, the Ten Commandments from our first reading, from the
Book of Exodus, are practically meaningless. Modern thinking would say
that they surely cannot be objectively what God wants of us! First of all,
we ourselves are the most important people and we have a right to be happy.
The Ten Commandments come from a previous age in which there was little
understanding of what we humans really need to be happy. Thus we turn to
ourselves as the basic standard of morality and ethics.
Even from the point of view of objective ethics, the values and ways of
living that we experience in our modern world are not so very good. They
are even less good when seen in the light of Scripture as truly the Word of
God, revealing Himself to us so that we can know what true happiness is.
We need to hear the words of today's Gospel of Saint John: turn over the
moneychangers' tables, do not accep
Readings of the day:
First Reading: Exodus 20.1-17
Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 1.18, 22-25++
Gospel: John 2.13-25
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