Saturday of the Fifth Week of Lent(Click here for readings)
Meditation by Kim Elenez
“I didn’t see that.” How many times have we uttered those words when we know we most definitely did see it? Perhaps to a colleague doing something that you both know is wrong, but chose to turn a blind eye. Maybe your child spilled a drink in a store, and you just looked both ways and kept going. “I didn’t see that.”
“I didn’t see that.” How many times have we uttered those words when we know we most definitely did see it? Perhaps to a colleague doing something that you both know is wrong, but chose to turn a blind eye. Maybe your child spilled a drink in a store, and you just looked both ways and kept going. “I didn’t see that.”
The Lord gives us so many
wonderful gifts – sight is one of them. With this gift we appreciate the power
of His majesty with color and expression. But He has also given our minds the
gift of sight in that we can “see” things without using our eyes. Understanding and comprehension are equivocal
to sight. And because of this, at times, we decide what we want to see.
You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.
I don’t remember where I picked
up this phrase. Probably in some business meeting or from some speaker, where
jargon and metaphors run a muck to turn dry conversation richer. That said, I
like it. It means that you can’t un-do some situations. For example, you can’t
un-say something. Once you’ve said it, it’s out there, now what will you do?
So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, “What are we going to do? This man is performing many signs. If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation.”
But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You
know nothing…
I have to believe the chief
priests and Pharisees felt like they had toothpaste all over the place. What are we going to do with this guy Jesus?
He’s out there making believers out of all these people, and we haven’t shut
him down? And we haven’t because, gulp, he’s got the goods to back up his claims.
Ok, ok, here’s the deal, fellas – you know nothing. Capiche?
So
from that day on they planned to kill him.
What if they hadn’t killed Him? What if they had chosen to honor Him and believe? What a mess that would have been to clean up! The Romans would have made their life absolute hell. To bad for those chief priests and Pharisees that they didn’t comprehend the reality that they would have had God on their side during that cleanup period with the Romans. Sometimes when the toothpaste is out, we make an even bigger mess trying to clean it up.
But remember this was not their
plan. God knew that these humans would fail. Christ’s passion was decided by God,
so it was going to happen, Pharisees or not. We flawed humans made sure of that
long before Jesus was born. This is God’s will – to go to the extreme to get
the point across.
As we prepare to enter holy week,
look around. What messes are happening around you that you typically don’t stop
to clean up? What are you choosing not to see? Maybe it’s a relationship with a
sibling? Maybe it’s a project at work that you’ve been procrastinating?
Spend some alone time with the
Lord. He will forgive what you’ve let slip, and you will get great joy from the
encounter. Lent is our time to stop repeating the mistakes of the past and to
great the world with a new sense of hope.
This meditation was written by Kim Elenez, wife, mother and media
executive in Dallas, TX. Kim converted to Catholicism in 2012.
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