I needed a new power cord for my little modern vacuum cleaner. It came in the mail this week. With it was a folded paper with directions written in multiple languages in type much too tiny for my eyes to read. It was the cover sheet that caught my attention. It said, “Life experience will get better when fully charged.”
That phrase became the lens through which I have viewed today’s scriptures, for they are about a plentitude of grace. Grace is our spiritual power cord.
Grace: such a beautiful word to say. The sound of it is soft, yet strong, elegant, yet humble—gracious (pun intended).
The catechism begins its discussion of grace with, “The grace of the Holy Spirit has the power to justify us (that is, to cleanse us from our sins and to communicate to us ‘the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ’ and through baptism.” (1987)
The next paragraph tells us how to become fully charged, “Through the power of the Holy Spirit we take part in Christ’s Passion by dying to sin, and in his Resurrection by being born to a new life; we are members of his Body which is the Church, branches grafted onto the vine which is himself.” (1988)
Subsequent paragraphs in the catechism describe how grace begins in us through a process of conversion. People in our parishes now are in the final weeks of a conversion to full communion with the Catholic Church, but the readings today call us to answer the calls God has made to us through readings, prayer, almsgiving, and penance this Lent to enter into his Passion, die to the sin God is showing us, to get ready for a new, FULLY CHARGED life of grace when we rise from our sinfulness to a new level of grace within us. We, too, are called to conversion.
This Laetare Sunday is the turning point in liturgy when readings, music, and homilies urge us to let go of whatever the sinfulness is that we have been holding onto and move into the LIGHT of God’s mercy and love. With this introduction, let’s look at the readings.
II Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23
The exiles in Babylon can go home now. They have been there 70 years. The trek back to Jerusalem and Judah will be about 900 miles.
It took the priest Ezra and his entourage about 4 months to walk it. Perhaps there were a few people who returned that were small children when Jerusalem fell, but generally, those who walked back to Jerusalem were descendants of the original exiles.
In our time of great mobility, perhaps many of our readers have been away from “home” for extended periods of time. You were out of the country when COVID came and forced to stay in a foreign land for much longer than you intended. You are an immigrant or refugee. You have been away at school or for work. You simply moved from family to a new place. There are many reasons. If you have that experience (or can imagine it), apply it to this Scripture. What great hopes and longings would have been in the people’s hearts!
Let yourself feel all that longing and apply it to your situation with God now. He’s inviting you HOME to be closer to him, to better match yourself to him. He gives you grace to do it. The walk back to Israel was a long and hard one. Even now, for us, it is likely to be a hard journey to Easter if we let ourselves be deeply converted, transformed. But there is that bright, great hope, light, and picture of a new, Resurrected life with Christ through grace.
John 3:14-21
O the beautiful words of the Gospel of John here: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”
This beautiful explanation of grace and its power comes from a conversation in the dark, in the night. Nicodemus came to Jesus “by night” because he was a member of the Sanhedrin. He was drawn to Jesus, but he didn’t understand what Jesus was saying and doing. So he asked! If you read the full story in John 3:1-21, you will see Nicodemus’ incredulity: Jesus’ logic doesn’t make sense to him at this point—“How can a person be born again?” he asks. He didn’t understand Jesus was talking about being born again through grace—grace given in baptism and nurtured through the Holy Spirit’s active residence in us.
For us at this midpoint of Lent, it can be hard for us to see what God sees. “But God, I can’t give up _____” (fill in the blank with the sin/fault/omission you are wrestling with this year). “I can’t imagine changing to____ (fill in the virtue).”
If you are there in your prayers or wanderings, read this passage and BE Nicodemus. Tell God ALL your objections, all your hesitations, all your fears. Come to Jesus in your night. He will listen…and give you grace to move from your stuck point if you ask.
Ephesians 2:4-10
This passage puts things in perspective—whether this Lent you are returning to a close relationship with God from one that has gone bland, or facing something in you that interferes with your relationship with God, or you are just walking through this penitential season dutifully doing your prayers, fasting, and almsgiving in an ordinary, nothing-special way.
This passage tells us all: Grace is the power cord. Plug it in. Get fully charged.
As the catechism says:
“The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life.” (CCC 1999) Paul says the same thing here, “God, rich in mercy, because of the love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ.”
The good that is done in us is FROM God. God GIVES it. It starts with sanctifying grace. Sanctifying grace is “a stable and supernatural disposition that perfects the soul itself to enable it to live with God and act by HIS love.” (CCC 2000)
It is a gift, but IT MUST BE FREELY received. The catechism says, “God’s free initiative demands man’s free response, for God has created man in his image by conferring on him, along with freedom, the power to know him and love him. The soul only enters freely into the communion of love.” (CCC 2002)
In today’s reading, Paul says it, “For by grace you have been saved through FAITH.” Remember what we said about faith a week or two ago: “By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God.” (CCC 143)
God gives grace. We receive it with faith. THEN the grace in us enables us to do works of love. Paul finishes his sentence, “… and this is not from you; it is a gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast. For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.”
Our good works are not our merit. Our good works are how God’s free gifts of love are shared with the world he loves THROUGH US when we are plugged in, fully charged.
How do we get fully charged? Confession is a good way to start.
Prayer
“Amazing Grace! How sweet the gift, how filled with life for me. I once was lost, but now I’m found, no longer ‘I’, but we.” Lord, that variation on the song Amazing Grace sings in me today. How great the gift of grace—your free gift to me that I may freely accept, that I may then be fully charged, part of a power cord that reaches out to the world in the night around me. Yes, the world may prefer the darkness to the light. But as your Gospel says, “Whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as DONE IN GOD.” Give me light, Lord, that I may be light.
