Week 6 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: James 1.12-18; Psalm 94; Mark 8.14-21

Yesterday we heard of Pharisees looking for a sign, today we hear about the disciples failing to understand the signs Jesus has already given. When he speaks of leaven they think of bread and wonder whether he is asking them about food supplies for their journey. Instead he is speaking figuratively, symbolically, poetically if you like, for the leaven of which he speaks is not that used in making bread but that which corrupts the teaching of the Pharisees.

It is easy to sense his frustration. Do they not yet understand? Are their hearts hardened? Do they not see, hear and remember? The teacher is exasperated, and these are supposed to be his better students, the ones closest to him! But just like the Pharisees yesterday they fail to appreciate the signs he has already given. They think literally, mechanically, whereas he is trying to lift them through the signs he has given to an understanding of God's presence, power and goodness.

The first reading teaches that temptation comes not from God but from desires which are leading us to sin and so to death. Our desires are so often immediate, insistent, demanding, blinding us and distracting us, preventing us from understanding. But Lent begins tomorrow, a time when we consciously expose ourselves to temptation, driven to do so by the Spirit and taught to do so by the Church. It is a time for checking once again about the truth and reality of our commitment, of our desire: where is my heart leading me? is it a hardened heart, blind and deaf to God's presence and God's call? is it a heart of stone that needs to be replaced with a heart of flesh? what is it I truly desire?

Today is called Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, a day on which people traditionally feed themselves full, often with pancakes, before moving into the desert of Lent, the time of fasting and prayer and alms-giving. The point of the exercise is not to see who can be more athletic spiritually but rather to focus once again on the threefold relationship in which the great commandment of love establishes us: loving God with heart and mind and strength, loving neighbour as myself. It is a time to be spent in the company of Jesus in his word, listening to him once again and seeking to understand his teaching in the way in which he intends it.

We ask Our Lord in this season to open our minds, to soften our hearts, to enable us to see more clearly and to listen more carefully, to remember his love and his sacrifice. We ask him to help us understand the height and depth and length and breadth of his love which surpasses knowledge so that we might, by Easter, be filled with the fulness of God.