Like a Mighty Champion

March 30, 2012

Friday of the Fifth Week in Lent

By Melanie Rigney

The Lord is with me, like a mighty champion: my persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph. In their failure they will be put to utter shame, to lasting, unforgettable confusion. (Jeremiah 20:11)

In my distress I called upon the Lord, and he heard my voice. (Psalms 18:7)

“If I do not perform my Father’s works, do not believe me; but if I perform them, even if you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may realize and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” (John 10:37-38)

Piety

Lord, help me to turn it all over to You—my need for retribution and revenge, my distresses, and my need to recognition when I do good that I claim is in Your name.

Study

Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, recently wrote a New York Times opinion piece titled “Does It Matter Whether God Exists?” He makes some interesting points, especially on our desire, perhaps need, to believe that God will always do the best for us:

Once we appeal to the gap between our limited knowledge and God’s omniscience, we cannot move from what we think God will do to what he will in fact do. So the fact that we think an all-good God would ensure our salvation does not support the conclusion that, all things considered, he will in fact do so. It follows, then, that even a decisive proof that there is an all-good, all-powerful God cannot assure us that we are ultimately safe. … There is no reason to think that we are good judges of what God is likely to permit. God may have to allow us to be deceived to prevent even greater evils.

So what if we’re not assured of salvation, even if we go to church and pray and do good works? What’s the point? What if God’s plan is something entirely different? What if those we regard as “the bad guys” win?

So what? Really, so what are we supposed to do here on earth if it turns out God isn’t all-good the way we define “all-good”?

All we need to do is look to Jesus’s spiritual indifference in today’s Gospel reading. Believe me or don’t believe me, he says, but believe in God’s works through me. That philosophy served him well during his time on this earth. May it do the same for us. May we do what we believe God desires… and have faith in Him to sort it out on the other side.

Action

Do one thing today not because it’s on your “Catholic card” or because you think it’s the price of admission to heaven. Do it because you believe He desires it.