A Reflection for the Wednesday of the Third Week of Lent

Today’s readings are all about the law, and our continued responsibility to uphold it. Many of us may have been raised with a poor or complicated notion of the law of the Hebrew Bible: perhaps you were taught about the “God who punishes,” or had it suggested that aspects of the law were rigid, antiquated or unnecessary because of the revelation of Christ in the world.  

A few years ago, a friend spoke to me about their own movement away from this perspective. “I have come to see,” they said, “the law–and stories of the law–not as a narrative of punishment but as one of God who always keeps the promises [God] gives to [God's] people.” 

Friends: God keeps promises. 

Friends: We must keep ours in return. 

Too often, Christians interpret our relationship to the law in a manner that is dismissive to the significance and truth of the religion of our Jewish brothers and sisters. But Jesus makes clear that we are, too, to live in relation to the law; and, the most sacred of the laws is the uplifting of life. We are bound by our faith to preserve the life and human dignity of all people. 

We cannot be dismissive of our Jewish brothers and sisters. Such assumptions not only reduce our capacity for meaningful interreligious friendships, they also encourage an ignorance that has been responsible for some of the darkest moments in the Church’s history. During Lent, along with my personal spiritual practices, I often reflect on the violence that Christians throughout history have exhibited towards our Jewish brothers and sisters during this particular liturgical time. While Easter may be a time of rejoicing for many of us, and Good Friday a time of meaningful contemplation and closeness with God, these days also bear long histories of interreligious violence. If these histories are unfamiliar to you, I hope you join me and spend part of this Lent acquainting yourself with them. 

While the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate made strides in decrying anti-Judaism and removing supersessionist and anti-Jewish language from the Good Friday liturgy, the work of reconciliation and dialogue with the Jewish people still continues with us. What would it look like for us, as Catholic individuals or communities, to heed the command to retain the law in our memory by remembering atrocity and working towards eradication of prejudice? How can we use memory as a starting place for repair? How can we keep our promises and, as is said at the conclusion of the Mass, live out the Gospel through our way of life?