DEACON TOM ANTHONY

Sunday, March 1, 2015






THE SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT
We read in Sacred Scripture how God commanded Abraham to take his son and sacrifice him as a holocaust offering to demonstrate his obedience to God. An angel then interceded to prevent any harm coming to Isaac. There is a definite parallel between this event and our own salvation story. God, because of his love for us, offered up his only begotten son as a sacrificial offering to us to demonstrate his love for us. Nobody prevented him from doing this. Nobody interceded before this event occurred. Jesus obeyed his father, picked up his cross, and journeyed through his Passion to his crucifixion.
We are urged to meditate on this decision continuously and explore how it is the foundation of our entire relationship with God. It is where the relationship should begin. As we struggle to understand God and allow him into our lives this sacrifice needs to be our entire focus. It should be a reflection of our obedience and love. By its example we can work to become closer to God. It is not only a story but an event that occurred to demonstrate the perfect relationship we can have with our creator.
The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ is what Lent is all about. We are given the opportunity to offer our own sacrifice to Jesus and enter into a spiritual experience. We are encouraged to feel what he felt and understand the love that he has for us more fully. We can then find the weaknesses in the relationship that we created through our sinful nature. These weaknesses can be repaired through hard work and adjustments. Knowing that Jesus is walking with us through our personal Passion can give us the added strength that we need as we come face to face with our faults and short-comings. Our lives can be utterly transformed in these short forty days of intense reflection and contemplation.

God gave everything to us from life to the entire universe. He then gave us more by letting us decide for ourselves whether to love him or reject him. And when this wasn’t enough he offered to us his only son. Yet we still doubt him. We still reject him; denying him the opportunity to love us. We spurn his advances and his pleas and choose to distort everything to fit our own desires and pursuits. We actually question his authenticity and commitment to us; choosing when and where we will embrace him if at all.
Yet he remains our greatest advocate. He is indeed with us always. He who gave us everything including the life of his son. It becomes plainly obvious that through this decision that he surely would not deny us anything. Once we allow this to define our faith we can truly experience a deeper understanding of what this relationship with God actually means to us.
Deacon Tom

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