18 March 2016
Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent
Back on with the purple. In today’s 1st Reading Jeremiah is presented in his sufferings as an icon of Christ. Spurned by the crowd, betrayed by his own, he is confident God will deliver him for God “has rescued the life of the poor from the power of the wicked.” Who are “the poor”? We hear that term repeated so often. But the poor Jeremiah and Jesus speak of are not defined by a social class, but by those who place their confidence in God, by those spoken of by Mary in the Magnificat and by Jesus in the first Beatitude. “God chose the poor of this world to be rich in faith”, as St. James tells us. To be poor means to make the message of today’s Gospel our own. Just as the Father sent Jesus to reveal to all that God is our Father, so we are called to depend on him, to trust in him in facing the disappointments and challenges we meet in our daily lives. Today I’ll pray for the spirit of true Christian poverty while reflecting on the sentiments expressed in the Entrance Antiphon of today’s Mass, and I’ll ask the Lord to increase my faith.