Today’s readings: 2 Chronicles 36,14-16.19-23; Ephesians 2,4-10; John 3,14-21.
Infantile faith is the worst enemy of spiritual maturity. It happens that with many of us, there is little or no difference between how we imagined God looking upon us when we were children and how we grown ups imagine Him. God is there in the first place to sustain us in our vulnerability and fragility, not to be the demanding perfectionist.
The first reading today gives account of the exile experience of the Jews when they were deported to Babylon. That was not a punishment for their infidelity but a consequence of their living in denial and of their dissolute behaviour. The exile for the Jews was a liminal situation where they lost everything, even their religious roots. It was there, in their second and most abject form of slavery in another foreign land, that they could fully grasp what God’s love was about.
In the promised land, when Israel was comfortably inhabiting a religious land and culture, belief in God’s sustenance was simply an ideology, a doctrine received from their ancestors and transmitted to the young. Their deportation in a foreign land brought about a spiritual deportation, creating a spiritual void and making them crave for points of reference and for a homecoming.
When through choices of their own, the Jews “ridiculed the messengers of God, despised His words, laughed at His prophets”, it was then that their Temple was burned down, the walls of Jerusalem demolished, its palaces set on fire, and everything of value in it destroyed. God, in His infinite love, also grants freedom. His strategy of recomposing His people was completely out of the norm. God is there, even when we think He is not.
It is infantile on our part to attribute to a punishing God what actually we ourselves procure through choices we make. God’s salvation is on offer. Whether we take it or not is a choice of ours. Pope Francis writes in his exhortation The Joy of the Gospel: “The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness”. Not to believe in God is not a sin. But to believe in Him might be a grace.
The God we believe in is the God who is rich in mercy, the God who is in love with the world He created and who gave His only Son “not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved”. Even in this time of Lent, which should conserve its character of penitence, fasting and almsgiving, we should not lose sight of the joy of salvation which is as real as as our sinfulness might be.
When in John’s gospel today we read that “whoever refuses to believe is condemned”, that need not be taken to mean that whoever refuses to believe is punished. ‘Condemnation’ is here to mean a form of spiritual deportation, a spiritual exile in which we at times lock ourselves. It stands for the different forms of exile in which we isolate ourselves and which breed emptiness and disconnection.
The account in the first reading from Chronicles is actually made up of flashbacks, a sort of re-reading the history of Israel from the perspective of a restored identity. From this perspective, the exilic experience for Israel was no longer a fatality, and the rising of Cyrus, king of Persia, was seen as providential. God always provides, in the sense that He is always there to sustain, to provide the remedy at the opportune moment.
The core of our belief is in John’s words: God so loved the world. But being the core of belief, that is not something easy to grasp. John reports Jesus as trying to convince Nicodemus. But to no avail, in spite of the fact that Nicodemus was a religious person. God’s love has to be experienced, not reasoned out.
Like the Jews, in our experience we can be wanderers, and at times, willingly or not, we can go through rough times that make us feel deported and in isolation. But we can still be touched by God’s love, which is healing and which restores in us always the true image of who we are called to be.