March 6/Second Friday of Lent
When the LORD called down a famine on the land and ruined the crop that sustained them,
He sent a man before them, Joseph, sold as a slave. ~ Ps 105.16-17
Origin stories are important, conferring lasting lessons and foundational values to those who come afterwards. A sprawling family reveres and emulates the perseverance and hard work of its immigrant ancestors; a company that started in a garage tries to maintain values of simplicity and collaboration even as it matures into a sophisticated enterprise; an advocacy group calls on the scrappiness and tenacity of its founder as it carries forward her dedication to her city. Today’s psalm verses, excerpted from a longer recital of God’s wondrous deeds that constitute the foundation history of Israel, focus on the story of Joseph. Here, a single theme resounds: God intervenes in the course of human affairs to save his people. Most of us remember the Joseph story from Sunday school: the jealous brothers who sell the favorite son into slavery; Joseph’s success in Egypt, the false accusations by Potiphar’s spurned wife, and Joseph’s imprisonment; his subsequent rise to head of the Pharaoh’s household because of his dream interpretations. Rejection and betrayal, unjust confinement, reversals of fortune — Joseph’s is hardly a linear history. Nor is ours. But even when events are messy and hardships abound and God is nowhere to be found, we must trust that his unknowable power is at work. As Father Gerald Vann, a 20th-century English Dominican preacher and author, wrote, “We live our lives at many different levels; and the events on the surface we can see and assess, but we may know little or nothing of what is going on deep down beneath the surface.” Even when we are unaware of the acts of God, or convinced that God has abandoned us to languish in suffering, He continues to operate in our lives – if we allow him to – with the ineffable, inscrutable power of his love.
Lord God, whose mystery will always be beyond human reach, May I sense your hand at work in my life even when it seems most absent. Amen.
For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/030626.cfm
To hear the Tabernacle Welsh Baptist Church (Cardiff, Wales) sing “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT4n1hGjDDg&list=RDwT4n1hGjDDg&start_radio=1
