One of the joys of social media is the ability to share in the faith journeys of fellow Catholics from across the country and around the world. This is a blessing at any time of the year, but during Lent it takes on an additional richness. Throughout these forty days we share with one another many outward signs of the season: posting photos of our ashes on Facebook and Twitter, trading accounts of what we are giving up, what books we are reading, how we are faring in our personal devotions, etc. All of these gestures and trappings build camaraderie and strengthen the sense that we are, indeed, a universal Church. Even deeper than this is the essential truth that Lent condenses and intensifies: that, as Christians, our lives are a continuous journey of repentance and sanctification, of shedding our sinfulness and our attachments to this fallen world and of drawing ever closer to Jesus, walking with Him along the royal road of the Cross and passing the watchful vigil of Holy Saturday in prayerful contemplation, trusting in the Lord’s promise that we will share in the Resurrection and Eternal Life of Easter Sunday. Having the ability to share our Lenten journey with our fellow pilgrims helps to draw us out of our self-absorption and myopia, and to see the true purpose of the Great Fast reflected in the prayers and actions of our brothers and sisters in Christ.
For some, this particular Lent carries an added significance. I am speaking of those men and women who are the candidates and catechumens of the Church. I have the pleasure of following on Twitter several individuals who on Easter will be entering into the fullness of the Faith. As we approach the halfway point, their example of joy in the Lord and eager anticipation of Easter, combined with a timely Scriptural passage, have caused me step back and contemplate Lent with fresh eyes.
First Reading from Monday of the Third Week of Lent
2 Kings 5:1-15AB
Naaman, the army commander of the king of Aram, was highly esteemed and respected by his master, for through him the LORD had brought victory to Aram. But valiant as he was, the man was a leper. Now the Arameans had captured in a raid on the land of Israel a little girl, who became the servant of Naaman’s wife. “If only my master would present himself to the prophet in Samaria,” she said to her mistress, “he would cure him of his leprosy.” Naaman went and told his lord just what the slave girl from the land of Israel had said. “Go,” said the king of Aram. “I will send along a letter to the king of Israel.” So Naaman set out, taking along ten silver talents, six thousand gold pieces, and ten festal garments. To the king of Israel he brought the letter, which read: “With this letter I am sending my servant Naaman to you, that you may cure him of his leprosy.”
When he read the letter, the king of Israel tore his garments and exclaimed: “Am I a god with power over life and death, that this man should send someone to me to be cured of leprosy? Take note! You can see he is only looking for a quarrel with me!” When Elisha, the man of God, heard that the king of Israel had torn his garments, he sent word to the king: “Why have you torn your garments? Let him come to me and find out that there is a prophet in Israel.”
Naaman came with his horses and chariots and stopped at the door of Elisha’s house. The prophet sent him the message: “Go and wash seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will heal, and you will be clean.” But Naaman went away angry, saying “I thought that he would surely come out and stand there to invoke the LORD his God, and would move his hand over the spot, and thus cure the leprosy. Are not the rivers of Damascus, the Abana and the Pharpar, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be cleansed?” With this, he turned about in anger and left.
But his servants came up and reasoned with him. “My father,” they said, “if the prophet had told you to do something extraordinary, would you not have done it? All the more now, since he said to you, ‘Wash and be clean,’ should you do as he said.” So Naaman went down and plunged into the Jordan seven times at the word of the man of God. His flesh became again like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.
He returned with his whole retinue to the man of God. On his arrival he stood before him and said, “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth, except in Israel.”
Coming in the wake of my Lenten pilgrimage to the shrines in Emmitsburg, MD, this reading resonated with me powerfully, and made me stop and realize what a humbling and sobering message it has for those of us who have grown up in the Church all our lives.
Compare and contrast the examples of Naaman and the king of Israel. On the one hand, we have a foreigner, a pagan who does not know God or His Law, and what is more, someone who is a sinner, his leprosy clearly denoting him as someone who has brought down Divine Judgment upon himself (at least, this is how his contemporaries would have understood his ailment). On the other hand, you have the ruler of ten of the twelve tribes of God’s Chosen People. One would expect the former to be a man of hardened heart, deaf to the Lord’s entreaties, while the latter to be a man of holiness and devotion, in tune with the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Yet the truth of the matter could not be more different!
Naaman, the Aramean general, is an archetypal convert. He was born in a foreign country, beyond the borders of the Promised Land. He worships false idols, bears a physical stamp of sin on his flesh, and knows nothing of the God of Israel. In every sense, literally, figuratively, and spiritually, he is distant from the Lord. Yet something deep within his soul thirsts for God. The false idols and the priests of his own country have proved incapable of curing his leprosy, and as time has gone on, Naaman has grown increasingly restless in his longing to be made clean again. So finally, with his soul prepared by the tribulation he has suffered, Naaman is open to hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit, coming, as it so often does, from the unlikeliest and most insignificant of sources: his wife’s Israelite slave girl. The message is brief and cryptic, a bare bones promise that in Israel dwells the healing power of God, and that, if sought, it can be found. Naaman sets out. He heeds the call of the Lord. This is by no means the end of the story, and it is not without difficulty and the need to subordinate his pride and his own preconceptions to the reality he finds in the prophet Elisha that Naaman is at last cleansed and renewed in the River Jordan. Yet it happens, and with that outpouring of God’s healing grace, not only is Naaman’s body cured of its leprosy, but also his soul discovers its Creator, and Naaman experiences a conversion of joy.
Now consider the king of Israel! He has every spiritual advantage: he has been brought up in the knowledge of the God of Israel and the Law of Moses, and he has come to rule and to lead the majority of the people whom God promised to set aside for His own portion out of all the earth, making of them a holy nation. Yet look how utterly faithless he is! When the messengers arrive from Aram, he immediately interprets the missive they bring to be an instrument of power politics. The king dismisses out of hand the idea that God may indeed be guiding these unusual events, immediately assuming the worst and falling into a hopeless despair. He sees nothing beyond the affairs of state. While Naaman, the pagan warlord, is willing to seek for a prophet of whom he has only heard a single rumor, the king of Israel appears even not to know that Elisha is living in his own kingdom, nor is he willing to consider the possibility that such a man might be dwelling in his land! Living in the midst of God’s people and His word, the king is a man who is spiritually blind and deaf.
This dichotomy between the convert who is attentive to God’s voice and actively seeks Him out and the life-long “believer” who is cut off from the Lord and thinks only of the things of this world is striking, and it would be wise for every Catholic to meditate on this as we continue our Lenten pilgrimage.
In the Gospel reading for that same day, Jesus references the story of Naaman when speaking to his enraged neighbors at Nazareth, who cannot believe the things he is preaching and doing, and utters those famous words, “No prophet is accepted in his own native place”. In doing say, he points a finger at the danger that arises out of over-familiarity. It is human nature to begin to take for granted those things that we possess for long periods, and our faith is no different. This is why, in many contexts, the phrase “cradle Catholic” has become synonymous with laxity. The people of Nazareth ought to have been the holiest men and women in all of history, because they had Our Lord dwelling in their midst for decades! Yet, when the time came, they rejected him and tried to kill him. Instead of recognizing and embracing the presence of God in their midst and allowing Him to elevate their daily lives, year in and year out, they observed that which is extraordinary and reduced it in their minds to the merely ordinary. How many times have we been guilty of this same negligence?
For my friends who will be entering the Church at the Easter Vigil Mass, each passing week of Lent brings with it an ever-building anticipation, as they draw closer and closer to the day when they can at last enter into the divine intimacy of the Eucharist and have their souls sealed with the Holy Spirit. Listening to them, it is readily apparent that they see Easter for what it really is: the moment when they will finally encounter the Risen Lord, their Savior, in His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity! For those of us who maybe have grown “comfortable” in our Faith, is this the spirit in which we approach Lent and Easter? Does each passing year bring with it an increase of joy and longing for the Resurrection, and a sense of purposeful movement and preparation for that day when we will stand face-to-face before Jesus? Are we like Naaman, attentive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and yearning above all else to plunge into the healing waters of God’s grace and been transformed?
Or are we like the king of Israel and the people of Nazareth? Do we Catholics, who at all times have Jesus close at hand, dwelling in our bodies and in our souls, take Him for granted? Has the Real Presence of Our Eucharistic Lord become an “ordinary” part of our lives, something nice in which to partake one day out of seven, but not particularly special, and certainly nothing that carries with it transformative joy? Do we approach Lent as a time of diligent, eager preparation for the coming of Divine Love to live in our midst and in our souls? Do we look ahead to Easter with the longing of a lover for his Beloved, yearning for the much-anticipated coming of the Hope and Salvation of Mankind? Or do we see this season merely as the time of year when we “give something up” and stop praying the Gloria and the Alleluia at Mass? Regarding Easter, do we think more about the coming of the Bunny than we do that of the Son of Man?
Lent is almost halfway finished, and as we enter into the second half of our spiritual pilgrimage, we ought to take stock and examine what kind of people we are, based on how we have traveled the first half of our journey towards the hill of Calvary and the empty tomb. Does Jesus dwelling within us find us to be His “native place”, where He has lived for so many years that He now held entirely without honor? Do we rend our garments like Israel’s king, appearing on the surface to be full of penance, while our hearts remain strangers to the Lord? Or are we pilgrims like Naaman, traveling from the foreign country of this life to the Promised Land of the Life Eternal, restless to enter into God’s mercy, with a convert’s heart beating in our breasts?
Christ Served By Angels In The Wilderness, by Ludovico Carracci, 1608-1610
