Monday in the 3rd Week of Lent
Interdepartmental Shopping

Readings: 2 Kings 5:1-15ab; Psalm 42:2, 3; 43:3, 4; Luke 4:24-30

We often hear it said that God works in mysterious ways. Indeed, in Isaiah 55: 8-9, we find these words: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways… As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts. How, we may wonder, does God’s thoughts differ from ours? Perhaps it goes something like this.

Human thought often proceeds like someone shopping in a huge department store. The goods are all neatly organized: men’s wear on one floor, for example, and ladies’ accessories on another. Convenient as this is, it also means that you can’t buy everything you want on the same floor. To shop for your wife or your mom, you have to first leave the floor where the stuff for your husband or your dad is found. In contrast, perhaps God’s thoughts and action are mysterious in that they are capable of holding very different, even apparently contradictory things, on the same floor. Consider what is happening in the readings today.

God does something truly extraordinary in the first reading. God heals Naaman of his leprosy. And Naaman takes extraordinary measures to receive this healing. He travels from Aram to Israel, bringing with him great riches to present to the foreign king. But notice also how God carries out this extraordinary healing. Not only does God work through an ordinary slave-girl, but, through the prophet Elisha, God also works the healing by having Naaman perform the very mundane act of bathing in a river. In fact, it is precisely because the request is so ordinary that Naaman is at first unwilling to do it.

Likewise, in the gospel, God is undertaking a radically new project: nothing less than the salvation of the whole universe. And yet, this novel initiative is undertaken in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who is so familiar to his own townsfolk that they find it impossible to accept him, and even go to the extent of seeking to kill him. What sets them apart from Naaman, the foreigner, is that they are unwilling to consider the possibility of entertaining the new in the familiar. They are resistant to entertaining two seemingly contradictory ideas. They refuse to consider the possibility of shopping for different things on the same floor.

Undertaking the extraordinary in the ordinary, initiating the new in the familiar: aren’t these striking examples of how mysterious are the ways of God?

And if this is how God thinks and acts in the scripture, perhaps it might do us good, especially in the season of Lent, to reflect more deeply upon how God might be doing the same in our lives. How, for example, does God work not just in church on Sundays, but also in our homes and offices and schools on the other days of the week? How are we being invited to respond to and cooperate with God’s initiatives in extraordinary events as well as in ordinary ones, in the familiar as well as in the new?

How is God inviting us to learn to shop across departments today?