Weekly Recap: Lent Week 4

FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION: LENT WEEK FOUR

To be authentic disciples of Jesus, we have to convert to following a new guidance system: the divine light of God within us instead of the natural light of human reason alone. This means living lives that are not just human but divine.

Invitation:

Jesus offers to “speak peace to a sinful world,” and to “teach us,” so that “our faith, hope and love may turn hatred into love, conflict into peace, death into eternal life” and “bring to the human race the gift of reconciliation.” If we love what Jesus offers us in the Church and believe in it, we will seek it as disciples, as students eager to learn and be nourished by God’s words.

Ask yourself in prayer and others in discussion, for each statement below: “Do you see this in the Scripture reading? What response does it invite?

Sunday: If we love the Church, we will seek nourishment from her and we will find it. We just have to know where to look.

To be disciples of Jesus, it is not enough to accept and do what he tells us. We have to learn how to look at things as he does.

Monday:: The Church is like a mother to us: loving, but conscientious. Mothers set the rules, keep family life ordered. It is necessary. But it isn’t the whole picture.

Tuesday: Those most persecuted t by others in the Church are the “prophets” — those who upset complacency by acting or speaking in a way that calls long-standing assumptions into question

Wednesday: Without the intimacy of personal interaction with God, we fall back on the impersonal relationship of rules, trying to “save ourselves” without his help.

The worst deception is to deny the prophetic gift out of fear of mistakes and trust in nothing but slavish obedience to laws. This is to deny the faith.

Thursday: God does not want to save the world unilaterally. He wants humans to pray for each other. Then what God does is our gift as well as his.

Friday: In today’s educated Church, every believer is challenged to ask about every Church doctrine and practice, “Where does it come from?” If we don’t, we will become a community of blind led by the blind.

Saturday: Our ultimate confidence is in the word of God and carefully discerned enlightenment by the Holy Spirit. Unqualified trust in anything else, besides the reliable but rare “defined’ dogmas of the Church, is idolatry.

Decisions:

Obey the rules, but interpret them according to the Father’s heart.

Believe Scripture as divine revelation. Read it as human dialogue.

Be a responsible believer. Know the origin of what you believe and do.