Monday of the Second Week of Easter
I talked with a couple friends about our Lenten journeys after Easter. We all expressed similar feelings about how we thought we had done in our efforts to change or our ability to keep our resolutions. We all had started out hoping to come to the end of Lent somehow ‘doing it better”. Basically we all felt we had fallen short of our expectations. I suspect many of us feel this way. But our faith journeys continue. Even if we did not meet our own expectations during Lent, these weeks immediately following serve as a reminder that it isn’t really about us or our successes or the times we fall short. It is about Jesus and the Spirit he sends us.
Today’s readings gives us a glimpse of people at different places on the journey of faith in Jesus and their response to the Holy Spirit. In the reading from Acts, Peter and John have just been released from the custody of the Jewish officials and return to their community of believers. Upon hearing their story, the community rose up in prayer together. “As they prayed, the place where they were gathered shook, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.” (Acts 4:31). This entire passage demonstrates a community completely abandoned to the Spirit. In the Gospel reading, Nicodemus comes to Jesus under cover of night. Nicodemus is a Pharisee who finds himself attracted to Jesus and his teaching but is unable to grasp what Jesus says to him about being born in the Spirit. Nicodemus, who also turns up later in John’s Gospel, is faced with the same struggle most of find we struggle with throughout our faith journey—letting go of established ways of thinking and behaving. While I may have an understanding of what Jesus said to Nicodemus, I can still strongly identify with how perplexed Nicodemus must have felt. Jesus’ teaching of living in the Spirit challenged the very foundation of Nicodemus’ way of living. To abandon relying on oneself and surrender to a force unknown and unseen is surely a terrifying prospect. And for Nicodemus it would mean rejecting his lifelong community as well. Even those of us who have spent a lifetime as baptized Christians face this struggle on a daily (hourly) basis. We set out each day trying to ‘do it better’ and invariably see how we have fallen short. This is the journey we have been chosen for. Still, because it is really all about Jesus and the Holy Spirit, maybe focusing on ‘doing it better’ is where our hearts should live; maybe that is where the Lord who saves us is really asking us to be.
In these weeks following Easter, I may reflect on my Lenten journey and see where I have come. I may realize how I have fallen short and even know I could have done better. I am not able to say I live my life completely abandoned to the Spirit like that young community I read about in Acts nor am I where Nicodemus found himself when he first went to Jesus. But I want to keep moving forward, becoming ever more responsive to the sound of the Spirit. I want to live knowing I can keep ‘doing it better’.
Dearest Father,
I cannot fathom what you have given me
And I cannot hope to deserve it
Grant me the grace to respond to your desires for me
That each day the sound of the Spirit
is ever more present to me,
With the intercession of Mary,
In Jesus’ name.
Amen.
--Gail Lyman