Third Sunday of Lent
God thought that we might, after some thought, come to the conclusion
that friends would not kill each other or seduce each other’s husbands
or wives or get them falsely convicted of crimes or kidnap or enslave
them or seek to defraud them of their possessions; yes, we might come
to work all that out, but all the same it would be a good idea to get all
this down in black and white… the Decalogue is part of God’s summons
to Israel to be his people… God is telling them that the first step to being
God’s people is to be human people, and that means living in friendship.
Herbert McCabe
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.
Flannery O’Connor (attributed)
The American writer Flannery O’Connor was a devout Catholic whose convictions tended toward the theologically conservative. Yet O’Connor’s theology was far from fundamentalist. She was whip-smart and well-read, and her orthodox beliefs were thoroughly tested and hard-won. In a 1955 letter to her skeptic friend, “A,” she defended her faith by saying, “For you it might be a matter of not being able to accept what you call a suspension of the laws of the flesh and the physical, but for my part I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, then I will know what God is. For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws.” Read more