Friday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time
I've been feeling overwhelmed, lately, with the enormity of the world's problems - and with the relative difficulty of my own problems too. I just find myself thinking sometimes that I am doing everything wrong, and when combined with what I see as the "wrongness" of the world (war, famine, political arguments) everything looks pretty bleak. Maybe it's the grey skies of January, or maybe it's just post-Christmas depression, but I'm just not feeling my best, and it's easy to get caught up in feelings of desolateness.
So I'm glad to have today's scriptures as a reminder to me that none of these problems is bigger than God's mercy.
Consider the first passage (1 Samuel 1:1-4a; 5-10a; 13-17). This is the rather famous story of David and Bathsheba. We've seen David in other passages, the mighty (and much-revered) king of Israel. In those other stories he is usually portrayed as good, but as today's scriptures suggest, he also turns out to be a rascal. He desires a friend's wife sexually, but ends up making her pregnant. As often happens in these kind of situations, it turns out that the husband has not actually had relations with his wife, so the pregnancy will be clearly adulterous. But rather than figure out some way to confess the whole thing, David tries to get his friend home suddenly. When that doesn't work, David deliberately puts his friend on the front line, and Uriah gets killed. He might not have actually shot the man himself, but he's clearly complicit in his friend's killing.
It's a terrible story, but it's a story that should remind us of a couple of important things about ourselves. First, we are never as good as we think we are. In David's case, did things start innocently but then progress to such a bad point? A simple wink or nod became too-easy familiarity which became lies and killing. Did the peoples' love for him go to his head so much that he misused his power in this way? That is, something good became something bad, and it wasn't because David set out to "be" evil.
But second, we're never as bad as we think we are either. God continues to be with David, to use him to guide the Kingdom of Israel. In today's gospel reading (Mark 4:26-34), Jesus talks about seeds. They start very small, but grow very large. The mustard seed that Jesus speaks of here is not like the ones we usually buy for the spice rack; his mustard seed is no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. Yet it really does become the largest of shrubs. In the most terrible of situations that we can think of - in famine and war and loss of life - as well as in the more ordinary "bad stuff" of every day human life, it can be difficult to think that anything good might happen.
I think it is NOT the case that good happens because of evil, but rather that through all of our lives, God is always present somewhere, even in the smallest tiniest ways that are so hard to see, we can barely recognize that God is there. That tiny seed of God's love, like the mustard seed, can be nurtured and grow, however impossible that may seem in the middle of hard times. I am reminded of Imaculee Ilibagiza's story as a Rwandan refugee. She was a Tutsi, one of those being hunted and persecuted like "cockroaches" and yet she survived the genocide. Some years after her experience, she wrote her extraordinary account of learning to forgive her enemies. At each turn in the story, she tells about the horrors of the genocide, but she always also includes something about the smallest grain of grace that she sees. She reminds me of the old saying: "My problems are never larger than God."
It isn't much that we need - only the faith to see a bit of the possibility of God that, remember, is no larger than this period. Today, let us reflect on that. Where is God in our lives, even in the smallest of ways?
- Jana M. Bennett