Monday of the Fifth Week of Lent
Several months ago there was a big fuss about a priest refusing Joe Biden communion. In the future there will be more media fusses about all sorts of events and human interactions. Today’s readings seem to offer us a Godly perspective on how we handle the media and the fuss.
I bring up the priest and Biden because just after it happened I got a message from a relative about my thoughts on the matter. This was one of my non-Catholic relatives and I sometimes get asked to offer a kind of Catholic perspective on things. I almost sent my initial off the cuff reaction. Then, I believe, the Lord slowed me down and got me to take a few more looks at the situation.
This is what Daniel did in the first reading and what Jesus does in the Gospel. Both Daniel and Jesus recognized that there was more to the story than what was being presented on the surface. There is always more to the story.
As we settle further and further into our social media dependency during this time of stay at home orders and social distancing, we need to live more and more like Daniel and Jesus. None of us will have a woman paraded past us on her way to be stoned, but we will get caught up in the quick judgments of social media. We will have plenty of times that a headline is all it takes for us to pass judgment on a person or their actions.
On my computer monitor, I have a post-it note with a quote I don’t remember finding and it says, “Never accept a label in place of a story.” This is the call we are offered today. We are called to seek out the story and ask what else is going on that we are not seeing right away. And there is always more to the story.
Practice seeking the missing details by starting with today's Gospel passage. Read it closely and start asking some of the questions Daniel would have asked and that Jesus seemed to know. Yes, we can all quickly gravitate to “what was Jesus writing in the sand?” but there are other questions that make this scene so compelling.
None of this is to dismiss that this is a scene of Jesus’ radical mercy, but nor should that take away from his wisdom. Jesus never accepted a label in place of a story, for he wants to bring our stories into his.
- Spencer Hargadon