THE psalmist knows that he can rejoice in the Lord because everyone can see how good the Lord is and how He saves the poor from his distress (Psalm 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7). Even sinners can rejoice and repentance becomes easier when we know that a merciful Father with open arms is waiting to welcome us home (Luke 15:1-3, 11-32).
Taste and see the goodness of the Lord
Psalm 34 starts off with an overflowing praise to God, proclaiming the appropriateness of blessing God at all times and with one’s whole being. The psalmist takes leave to glorify God as though in an assembly at worship where other lowly ones (the anawim), who trust and depend on the Lord, are gathered and can hear the doxology and be glad. The testimony of the psalmist becomes an invitation to others to join him in rejoicing and in extolling the name of the Lord. Without giving details, he confesses that he was in distress and that the Lord rescued him and delivered him from all his fears when he sought Him. For this reason, he glorifies the Lord and bids others to do the same and trust the Lord and praise Him.
The others are encouraged to look to the Lord, so that they, too, may rejoice in gratitude and their faces radiant with joy and not covered with shame. One’s dignity and condition is mirrored and manifested on one’s face, as when Moses’ face became radiant with divine light (Exodus 34) after his 40 days and nights of being with God on Mount Sinai. In our afflictions, let us turn to the Lord and call out to Him, and He will hear us and save us, as is illustrated by the experience of the psalmist. We are all encouraged to taste God’s goodness and to experience for ourselves how fulfilling it is.
God defined as the merciful Father
TO eat with sinners is somehow to share with them their life; that is why the Pharisees and scribes faulted Jesus for eating with tax collectors and other public sinners. The company He was keeping and His association with outcasts contaminated Him, according to those guardians of the law. It was opening to sinners the kingdom of God, according to Jesus. The close-mindedness of the opponents of Jesus, who consider themselves in their exclusive ritual puritanism as faithful to God, stands in stark contrast to the immeasurable kindness and mercy of God now made manifest and available in Jesus.
In the gospel parable, the obviously depraved behavior of the younger son is commensurate to the extremes he was reduced to. But his eventual repentance was as complete as his defilement was thorough. The elder son resented his father’s joy at the return of his brother, for he lacked compassion for his unfaithful brother. The Pharisees’ mean-spiritedness is duplicated by the elder brother’s rejection of his own brother. The father’s marvelous understanding of his two sons as they were, respecting their decisions even as he disagrees with them, his courage to depart from the patriarchal tradition to be himself as a loving father, and his boundless mercy and compassion for both his sons, reveal the radically different image of God, the Father of Jesus and as the Father of us sinners.
Alálaong bagá, we are given the reason for rejoicing in Lent: God is a merciful Father to us His sinful children. He faithfully waits for us to return to Him from our deviations from His love. The prodigality of God in His compassion to us is the cause of our joy. But to avail ourselves of it we have to learn to repent, acknowledging our mistake and overcoming our self-centeredness and resentment of others, and humbly returning to our Father’s warm embrace.
Join me in meditating on the Word of God every Sunday, 5 to 6 a.m. on DWIZ 882, or by audio-streaming on www.dwiz882.com.