Lord, I Love Your Law
SCRIPTURE REFLECTION FOR THE third SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (JANUARY 24, 2016)
As moving as certain scripture passages are, I have to admit they don’t usually bring me to tears or have me glued to the edge of my seat staring intently at the lector when I hear them read during Mass. Yet the proclamation of the Word for this Sunday gives us a couple of readings about scripture readings, and they seem to have a strange and profound effect on people.
The people’s blown-away reactions remind me of a story that Bishop Robert Barron told in his keynote address at the World Meeting of Families last September. He described in memorable detail a golf lesson someone had given him, and how it literally stretched him to follow that person’s instructions, even to where at one point he exclaimed, “I’m dying!” But by the end, those instructions had such a noticeable effect on his golf stroke that when his instructor suggested they call it a day, he was crying out, “Give me more!” What struck him at that moment, he related, was the psalmist’s line, “Lord, I love your law!”
Anyone who has ever been pushed to learn to do something better has probably experienced this paradox at some point: that feeling of being stretched past our limits, which still somehow leaves us begging for more when we find that the challenge has become the reward. This might help to explain such emotional reactions to scripture as the weeping and rejoicing when Ezra reads the law, or the electrified silence when Jesus reads the prophet Isaiah. The law that moves men, women and children to weep, maybe lamenting their own shortcomings, is the same law the psalmist praises as “refreshing the soul” and “rejoicing the heart.” A sobering reading is at the same time an occasion of rejoicing. God’s word is challenging, and it is also glad tidings.
Each of today’s scriptures reflects the joy and the challenge of the call that has a claim on each of us as children of God. That call is both universal – to proclaim liberty to captives and sight to the blind and to let the oppressed go free – and specific to each one of us as we discern our particular role among the many parts of the body of Christ. Often this discernment may happen gradually and piecemeal rather than all at once. But maybe that is all the more reason that every new discovery of the ways in which we are called is cause for rejoicing in the Lord. May the joy of his law be our strength.
Image: Scripture, by JoePhilipson Found on Flickr under a Creative Commons License.
Julia Smucker
Julia Smucker was received into the Catholic Church in 2010, yet remains deeply connected to her Mennonite roots. She attended Catholics on Call in 2011 while in the middle of obtaining her MA in systematics (with a minor in liturgy) at St. John's School of Theology in Collegeville, Minnesota. She currently works as a language interpreter and translator for French and Haitian Creole in addition to various writing projects. She thrives on words, music, community and the sacraments.
