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GOSPEL MEDITATION

March 23, 2025
3rd Sunday of Lent

My childhood best friend was Xander Price. He was the fastest runner in school, an excellent baseball player and Jewish. Though his family wasn’t intensely religious, I felt totally at home with them despite our religious differences. Everything about their Judaism seemed to undergird and strengthen my own experience of being a Catholic. I knew they didn’t believe in Jesus like my family did, but I intuited somehow that Jesus was “hiding” in their religion. Like a cat moving under a blanket, ready to emerge at any moment, the Lord was hidden there in a special way. In the Gospel for this third Sunday of Lent, Jesus says, “For if you had believed Moses, you would have believed me, for he wrote of me” (John 5:46). Stunning words, those. Moses wrote about Jesus. The way therefore that we come to know and believe in Jesus is to discover him lurking in Moses’ writings. The Hebrew Scripture is the wonderful womb in which Jesus gestates within a host of images: Adam, Isaac, David, Melchizedek, the Temple, sacrificed lambs, prophets and so on. Right now, in your parish’s OCIA program, soon-to-be baptized people are carefully studying where Jesus is in the writings of Moses, so that they may believe in him. This works for all of us, too, who wish to deepen our knowledge and love of Jesus. Lenten challenge: Take some time to prayerfully study one of the images of Jesus listed above in the Old Testament. Identify which one you find compelling and consider why this is so. If you don’t know where to start, begin with the prophet Jeremiah as an image of Jesus.  — Father John Muir  ©LPi