Holy Week in Chester 8: “I AM: The Burning Bush, Ends and Beginnings”

“It is accomplished” cries Jesus from the cross, his final word in St John’s passion story. It’s natural to think of Good Friday as a day of despair or resignation as the other gospel writers do. St John stands out for his sense of completion, something accomplished, brought to its proper conclusion. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work” Jesus has said near the beginning of the gospel. As he turns his face towards the cross he prays, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do”. Tetelestai! It is done.

Endings and beginnings seem to meet at Golgotha as we hear John’s great narrative. The cross feels like a great full stop, a closure, an end. We hear in Jesus’ words an unmissable tone of finality, even triumph. Perhaps that takes us by surprise? Not if we’ve been paying attention to the way St John has told his story. This end is not, for him, the petering out of a life that began so well. It is not the tragedy of a career that has been wasted, brought to nothing. It is not the extinguishing of a guttering candle flame finally overcome by the darkness. Rather, it’s that this great light has never shone more steadily, more brightly than at Golgotha. Far from representing the waste of a man’s career, this is its moment of culmination. His life, said Jesus speaking of himself as the good shepherd, was not taken from him. He laid it down of his own accord.  On the cross he draws all humanity to himself. On the cross there is vindication of all that he came among us to be and to do. On the cross his work of love is accomplished. What binds him to the cross is not nails but love. He reigns over us as the king of love, a kingship that is not from here but from another place  entirely. This is where we recognise glory, full of grace and truth, love’s endeavour, love’s expense, love to the very end.

Therefore, this finished work, this end is also a beginning. It’s a threshold across which a new horizon is glimpsed. It’s the door "held open to us that no-one can shut, the gateway to possibilities we only dared to dream about. The story of the crucifixion ends with Jesus’ body being laid in a tomb by those who loved him – in a garden, precisely where the resurrection story begins, at the break of day, on the first day of the week, like the garden that God planted at the beginning of time when he created this good earth and placed our first parents in it. Beyond the full stop of today’s “it is finished”, another sentence is launched, a new one whose words open up for all humanity a paradise of promise, healing and reconciliation. 

“In my end is my beginning” was the motto of Mary Queen of Scots which she embroidered on a cloth just before her execution. Perhaps she was inspired by the salamander, the symbol of her grandfather-in-law Francis I, the creature that in myth was supposed to self-ignite at death in order to be reborn out of the ashes, young and new and strong. T. S Eliot plays with that motto in his great poem East Coker. It starts out as a pessimistic reversal of Queen Mary, “In my beginning is my end”, an echo perhaps of the Prayer Book funeral sentence, “In the midst of life we are in death”. Yet from there Eliot finds his way to a place of expectation and hope, as if to affirm: in the midst of death, we are in life. St John would recognise it that way round. “In my end is my beginning.” If Good Friday is an end, then it is pregnant with hope and possibility. For love is not eclipsed by suffering, nor its glory by death. And if Jesus’ death is both the end but not the end, then the grave has lost its victory and death its sting. 

This Holy Week in the Cathedral, we have been looking at the seven sayings of Jesus in St John that begin with the words I AM: “the door”, “the resurrection and the life”, “the light of the world”, “the bread of life”, “the true vine”, “the way, the truth and the life” and “the good shepherd”. Those words “I am”, so emphatic in the Greek, take us back to the book Exodus. There Moses is confronted by the sight of a bush that burns but is not consumed. He is overawed. Then he hears a voice addressing him out of the fire. “I am that I am” it says mysteriously. It’s nothing less than the sacred name of God whose nature can only be explained in terms of itself, for God will not be likened to anything we can see or handle. “I am”, that is, the ground of all existence, all life, all consciousness, all thought. And this is the divine name with which Jesus associates himself in St John. “Before Abraham was, I am” he declares, the eternal One who is in the world yet beyond it, the great I AM who is the source and end of all that has been, and is, and ever shall be. So the risen Christ says of himself in the book of Revelation, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end”.

This is how St John portrays the majestic figure who is enthroned in the cross at Golgotha. How can God suffer and die? we ask ourselves. Other faith communities find this the most baffling question Christianity poses. If you want to see a display of naked power, a crucified God makes no sense. If you want to hear fine wisdom, a messiah nailed to a cross is not for you. There are many for whom Good Friday is a real stumbling-block. And yet... there is power and there is wisdom at the cross, a divine wisdom and a divine power that change lives, heal brokenness and bring great hope. Faith takes us to a place where we see how love drives God to embrace the cross and in doing so, embrace his whole creation in a supreme act of self-giving, what Jesus calls laying down his life. If God is not crucified, there is no God as Christians understand him and no Christianity worth following.

I imagine the cross as St John’s burning bush. It’s the place of transfiguration where we take off our shoes because we are on holy ground. We turn aside today to look into this sacred fire, and open our ears so that we can hear the divine voice that speaks to us. What do we see? The flame of love, its glory and its light blazing with divine passion for the world, for the human race, for each of us. And what do we hear? The word that says: here is the essence of all that it means to be God. Here at Golgotha we see his nature and his name. I AM utters that voice, I am all that love means, all that meets our hungers and hopes, that than which nothing greater, nothing more glorious can be dreamed or conceived, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the origin and destiny of all that is, our light, our life, our love. 

“It is accomplished.” In my end is my beginning. We gaze on the burning heart of God. We sense that in these holy days of the paschal season, the sun is rising upon us. There is a new creation. The day breaks and the shadows flee away. After a long and gloomy winter, spring has come at last. 

Holy Week in Chester 3: “I am the Light of the World”

Reading: John 9.1-12

In our Holy Week journey through the I AM sayings of St John’s Gospel, we have looked at the Door, and at the Resurrection and the Life. Tonight, we come to “I am the Light of the World”. 

Light is a universal word we find in all the world’s religions. And like last night’s life, light is one of the great words of St John. The two are linked together in the very first paragraph of the gospel that we read at Christmas time, “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it”. That passage in turn looks back to the creation story in the Book of Genesis where the first words God speaks are “Let there be light!”  “And there was light” the text says, “and God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. The light he called Day, and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

In Genesis, light and darkness, day and night aren’t yet distinguished by moral or spiritual values. Light is to see by, and the daily rhythm of light and darkness is given in order to structure time. But in St John it is very different. Night time and darkness are dangerous and risky. When Judas left the upper room to hand Jesus over to the authorities, he “went out”, says John, “and it was night” – an observation left hanging in the air as its own commentary on the darkness that had overtaken the betrayer’s soul. “And this is the judgment” says Jesus earlier, “That the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” Or as he says on the very threshold of Holy Week, “the light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light so that you may become children of light.”

All of which heightens the significance of Jesus’ saying, “I am the light of the world.” He has already spoken these words in the previous chapter and added: “whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life”. But now, Jesus embeds those same words in the important story of the healing of the man who was born blind. Like the raising of Lazarus last night, this sign is another disclosure of God’s activity in the world, his “works” as John calls them. “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 

But light has its different aspects. In St John, the Light of the World enables us to see in things in new ways. C. S. Lewis famously said that he believed that the sun had risen, not because he gazed directly at it but because by its light he could see the world, other people and himself. Illumination is a key stage in the classic spiritual path. Not for nothing did our eighteenth-century forebears speak about enlightenment as an event (God-given, some said) in the journey of scientific method and intellectual self-awareness. But if you were the poet William Blake, you would describe looking into the sun as gazing at angels. So you did that with great care, knowing how risky it is to expose yourself to such a fierce, unforgiving light. Indeed, one of the Psalms talks about God wrapping himself in light as in a garment, an idea taken up in the hymn Immortal, invisible, God only wise, In light inaccessible hid from our eyes. ’Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee it goes, verses rich in theological wisdom. The paradox is that light conceals as much as it reveals. Moses prayed, “Lord, show me your glory”, but is warned to protect himself in the cleft of the rock because if he so much as glimpses Divinity as he really is, it will kill him. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” says T.S. Eliot, least of all when that reality is God. 

St John plays with some of these themes in the course of his gospel. In particular, he takes us back to Moses in the prologue we keep returning to. Where Moses had asked to behold God’s glory but had needed to be shielded from experiencing its fulness, John tells us that in the Word made flesh who lived among us, “we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth”. His claim is as high as it could possibly be. And to underline it, as he embarks on telling the story of Jesus’ works among humankind, the great “signs” he performs, John says that he “revealed his glory and his disciples believed in him”. 

And it is not long before Jesus begins to speak of the destiny that awaits him, his own suffering and death. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” he says; and later, in his prayer on the very threshold of his passion, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do”. We know where it is that Jesus finishes his work, for he tells us so in his last word from the cross: “It is accomplished”. If you had asked St John, where do we see God’s glory most clearly, where do we see his light shining most steadily, he would answer, at Golgotha, at the cross where love’s work is completed, where the crucified Lord lays down his life for his friends, where the Son of Man is enthroned as the king who is lifted up so that he may draw all people to himself. In the Fourth Gospel, the cross, the last and greatest sign of glory, represents not defeat but God’s work achieved, completed, victorious.

It’s worth lingering on this point about the Johannine cross. It seems perverse to use words like light and glory of that darkest and cruellest of places, Golgotha, the “skull”. But that paradox, seeing glory in a place of ignominy and shame, light in the midst of darkness and desolation, is precisely John’s point. “There is in God a deep and dazzling darkness” says one mystical poet. It’s not far from St Paul’s language about seeing God’s wisdom in the folly of the cross, his power in its weakness. “It is accomplished” proclaims Jesus in the last word from the cross in St John. Throughout the gospel, he emphasises how Jesus has come into the world to do the work of God and complete it, or as he says of Jesus in the upper room, to love to the very end. So tetelestai, “it is finished”, is the most important word in the Passion narrative. 

On Good Friday, Bach’s St John Passion will be performed in the Cathedral. I wonder how Bach’s setting of that last word will be sung by the bass who takes the part of Christus. It’s a falling line in Bach’s music, Es ist vollbracht.  I hope it will be with firmness and confidence, not resignation and defeat. I have a theory that just as the last words from the cross in the other gospels are quotations from the Psalms, John’s “it is finished” refers to the conclusion of the Passion Psalm 22. Matthew and Mark tell how the dying Jesus quotes the first line, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Could it be that St John alludes to the triumphant last line of that Psalm that moves from utter despair to gratitude and praise: “future generations will proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it”. He has performed it. All is done. Tetelestai. That’s glory.

And because it is done, the cross inevitably points beyond itself to the new day that begins at Easter. As we saw last night in the story of the raising of Lazarus, throughout John’s gospel, resurrection seems to be enfolded into the passion and crucifixion in a single movement that the author describes as Jesus’ “going to the Father”. When the Easter story begins and Mary goes to the tomb, it is still dark. I think it’s meant to point up the contrast between what she and the disciples don’t yet know, can’t yet grasp about the empty tomb, and what the emerging light of day will reveal to be the dawn of a new glory, that Jesus is risen and is present to his people until he returns to his Father. 

So the Light of the World gives sight not only to the man born blind, but to the whole of creation, for “the true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world”. For St John, the incarnation, the signs, the crucifixion, the resurrection are like the seamless robe for which the soldiers cast lots in his passion story. They all disclose the glory that is revealed as the Light of the world that he loves, says John, “to the end”. This Holy Week we celebrate the great light that shines into the shadowy places of life, brings warmth and vitality to a cold dark world, and shows us the way back to him so that we can learn to be God’s people once again.

Here is how Malcolm Guite puts it in his sonnet on the Light of the World.

I see your world in light that shines behind me,
Lit by a sun whose rays I cannot see,
The smallest gleam of light still seems to find me
Or find the child who’s hiding deep inside me.
I see your light reflected in the water,
Or kindled suddenly in someone’s eyes,
It shimmers through the living leaves of summer,
Or spills from silver veins in leaden skies,
It gathers in the candles at our vespers
It concentrates in tiny drops of dew
At times it sings for joy, at times it whispers,
But all the time it calls me back to you.
I follow you upstream through this dark night
My saviour, source, and spring, my life and light.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission 

Retreat Address on the Psalms 4 - Prayer and the Memory of Failure (Psalm 106)

This psalm is the last of a sequence of long psalms which concludes Book IV of the Psalter. Psalm 102 is one of the penitential psalms which is answered by 103, a joyful song of forgiveness. 104 is a glowing hymn that celebrates the marvels of creation as God’s handiwork. Psalm 105 continues the theme of telling the story of God’s ‘wonderful works’ (105.2) by recalling how the Hebrews were delivered from Egypt, kept safe through the years of wilderness wandering and finally installed in their own land. Together, these four big Psalms encompass the whole of Hebrew faith in a God who has created the world and loves his people, who has redeemed Israel as his chosen and looks for a covenant relationship with them.  

Psalm 106 tells the same story as 105, but from a quite different perspective.  Its first few verses are deceptive.  The invitation to praise the Lord! O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures for ever’(1) is very like the start of 105.  We imagine that this joyful note of celebration will be continued through 106 as well.  But it is not to be. There are soon hints of a minor key: remember me, O Lord, when you show favour to your people; help me when you deliver them (4-5).  The sun may have risen in a clear sky, but it is not long before clouds begin to obscure it.  

The hues become rapidly more sombre.  Both we and our ancestors have sinned; we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly (6).  This is not simply some general acknowledgment of human frailty but the psalmist’s recognition of a specific strain of rebelliousness on the part of the people.  What made their unbelief particularly culpable was that it went right back to the founding events of their story, and this in the face of the clear evidence of all that God was doing for his people.  Our ancestors, when they were in Egypt, did not consider your wonderful works; they did not remember the abundance of your steadfast love, but rebelled against the Most High at the Red Sea (7).  And this becomes the depressing theme of this long recital of Israel’s waywardness.  She had been redeemed from slavery, and set on the long march to freedom.  Yet inwardly there was no redemption and therefore no true liberation.  The message of the Psalm is that this people were as enslaved as ever in their hearts.  Freedom still lies in the future.  And the psalmist himself is part of this carefully crafted confession. both we and our ancestors have sinned.  

God however constantly acts in spite of the people’s unbelief and ingratitude. The “gets” and the “buts” of this psalm are striking. Yet he saved them for his name’s sake, so that he might make known his mighty power (8).  Faced with the signs and wonders of the Exodus, there is, to be sure, a period of obedience: Then they believed his words; they sang his praise (12).  But it doesn’t last long. They soon forgot his works (13).  Forgetfulness, or rather, the more blameworthy “not remembering” is the fundamental issue of this Psalm for which the people are both culpable and to be pitied.  To the psalmist this spiritual amnesia is not only hard to forgive but hard to understand, in stark contrast to how God himself does not forget his covenant but ‘remembers’ it, as the psalm goes on to say (45).  

This interplay of divine memory and human forgetting follows the way the stories are told in the Books of Exodus and Numbers.  The central section (13-33) is an indictment of the Hebrews for their failure of memory and their lack of faith in the desert.  A long sequence of episodes reinforces this bleak message.  No sooner have they crossed the sea than they ‘test’ God by demanding to be fed (14-15). Then envy sets in, represented by the rebellion of Dathan and Abiram (16-18) whose grumbling against Moses led to a spectacular display of judgment. I said yesterday when we looked at the wisdom psalm 49 that envy is so often the root cause of wrongdoing. So it is here. What follows is the episode of the golden calf (19-23) made by Aaron at the insistence of the people, an act of defiance not only of Moses’ leadership but of the covenant itself.  All this was tantamount to ‘despising’ what was promised (24) while they grumbled in their tents and did not obey the voice of the Lord (25). And then the wholesale collapse into idolatry, which is to give to a created thing the honour that is due only to God. 

However, God hesitates to treat the people as contemptuously as they have treated him.  Just as he saved them from the enemy despite their rebellion (8), so twice he restrains himself from executing the judgment that their behaviour merits.  On both occasions, this is at the behest of a human intercessor.  The first time it is Moses who after the incident of the golden calf stays God’s act of execution. Therefore he said he would destroy them – had not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach (23).  The prayer attributed to Moses in Exodus 32.1-14 movingly asks God to ‘remember’ his promises of old, and not to bring himself into disrepute by appearing to be fickle in his treatment of the Hebrews.  The second occasion (24-31) occurs when the Hebrews have fallen into idolatry by engaging in the worship of ‘Baal of Peor’ and in illicit sexual activity. Thousands of Hebrews perish in the plague that follows.  However Phinehas, a grandson of Aaron demonstrates such zeal in acting against one of the transgressors that he earns for himself an everlasting memory as God’s favoured priest: and that has been reckoned to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever (31).  

We would like all these events to be simply episodes in an otherwise blameless history.  We would understand it if the difficulties and challenges of extreme circumstances in the desert brought out the worst in the people. Surely things will get better when they arrive in a generous and fertile land!  Yet the final part of the story relentlessly drives home the lesson that nothing has changed when they cross the Jordan. Their desires remain as disordered as they always were.  When they should have purified the land of its pagan cults, instead they merely make its religious practices their own (34-39), its depravity symbolised by the practice of child-sacrifice (37-38), always in the Hebrew scriptures a mark of people who have sold out to the most corrupting behaviour imaginable.  In this way, he says, they not only pollute the land but themselves (38-39) in acts of apostasy that the psalmist, in common with prophets like Hosea, unsparingly calls acts of shameless ‘prostitution’.  

This is why the Israel finds herself in her current predicament.  Up to now, the psalmist has not mentioned the historical situation in which Israel finds herself.  But at the Psalm’s climax it becomes clear what this long recital is for.  It’s to assert that in a decisive act of history, God has finally done what he had intended to do all along: to punish the people for their unfaithfulness.  His prayer at the very end makes clear what this refers to: Save us, O Lord our God, and gather us from among the nations (47).  The people are overrun and in exile.  And this time there is no-one to intercede for them.  They are on their own before God.  Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against his people… he gave them into the hand of the nations, so that those who hated them ruled over them (40-41).  We are in the 6^th century BCE when Israel is in the alien land of Babylon and crying out in despair, in the words of a more famous psalm, ‘how shall we sing the Lord’ song in a strange land?’ (Psalm 137:4).

Bleak though this landscape is, the psalmist is not without hope.  In a final act of remembering, he recalls how Yahweh heard his people when they were oppressed and saved them (43-46).  The cry for deliverance with which the Psalm ends is almost no more than a simple coda.  But how much poignancy and pain is compressed into the single verse in which the psalmist, taking up the mantle of Moses and Phineas on behalf of the people, beseeches the Lord to save his people (47).  There is no pretence that the story is other than it is, no pitiful excuses or self-justification.  There is simply the hope, reminiscent of Moses’ prayer, that a restored and grateful people will demonstrate God’s faithfulness to the world: gather us from among the nations, so that we may give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise’. The last verse, a doxology of praise to mark the end of Book IV of the Psalter, also stands as the anticipated thanksgiving of a restored people who can once again say ‘amen’ to a final act of deliverance.

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This long catalogue of perversity and its punishment does not exactly lift the spirits. So what should we do with texts like this? 

Here are three reflections. First, the psalm reminds us that while there are times, many of them, when we need to tell our story in order to celebrate it, at other times we need to tell the same story as an act of contrition and lament.  I don’t think we are good at doing this, either as nations and communities, or as individual men and women. What this psalm makes us face up to is our propensity to deceive ourselves as to our true state before God and one another. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” So it comes down to spiritual candour, making sure that when we hold up the mirror to ourselves, it tells us the truth. “Faking it”, as we might say, “play acting” as Jesus calls it in the Sermon on the Mount, inevitably leads in the end to disclosure and downfall. What we are in ourselves will always become plain to see in time, like the picture of Dorian Grey. Our desires always give us away in the end because they make it plain what we truly value. 

And, says the story, it all happens because of our neglect of God. St Augustine says that sin is to be “bent back into yourself”, that is, giving way to desire that is misshapen, distorted because its focus is on yourself, not on God. He says that it's therefore a failure of love, not so much a lack of love but applying love in a self-serving way.  This psalm gives us an anatomy of disordered desire, how we can and do give ourselves up to the wrong things which can never be ends in themselves. In the opening chapters of the Letter to the Romans St Paul takes up words and images from this Psalm and universalises them. He says in effect, this story of Psalm 106, of forgetfulness, envy and idolatry is us, all of us, at least in terms of our unreserved propensity. ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3.20). St John urges us to keep ourselves from idols. You could say that “good” religion comes down to this, freeing ourselves from idolatry and acknowledging and worshipping the one true God. And this is the possibility held out to us in the gospel.

And that brings us on to my next reflection, which is about transformation. There lies in this psalm a profound impetus for change, for a new direction in the future. In one of his essays Thomas Merton says that “the Christian’s vision of the world ought, by its very nature, to have in it something of poetic inspiration”. He means by this seeing “beyond the surface of things and events”, glimpsing “something of the inner and ‘sacred’ meaning of the cosmos which, in all its movements and all its aspects, sings the praises of its Creator and Redeemer. And if this is true of how we contemplate the created world, it's also true of how we tell the story of God’s mighty works. In that story, we need to learn like the psalmist how to discern not only our human frailty but the sacred and redemptive too, not only nature but grace.

This sacramental vision of life may sound altogether too rarified for the cut and thrust of life. But for Merton, it’s precisely in “ordinary time” that we most need to cultivate this contemplative, poetic attitude that glimpses possibilities in the banal, the dispiriting, the tragic stories of human life. He goes on: “There is no revolution without a voice. The passion of the oppressed must first of all make itself heard at least among themselves, in spite of the insistence of the privileged oppressor that such needs cannot be real, or just, or urgent. The more the cry of the oppressed is ignored, the more it strengthens itself with a mysterious power that is to be gained from myth, symbol and prophecy. There is no revolution without poets who are also seers. There is no revolution without prophetic songs.” Merton is thinking about human oppressors, but in the psalm it is corruption and vice that are the oppressing enemy from whose iron fist we cry out to be saved. St Paul describes this conflicted experience in Romans chapter 7 where he agonises about the good he wants to do but can't, and the evil he wants to shun but instead finds himself committing. Merton and St Paul tell me that the oppressor does not have the last word. And believing this is the motivation I need to act for change, or at least to pray for it. 

Finally we should notice the key role in this psalm that belongs to Moses and Phinehas. To “stand in the breach” and make intercession for others is one of the greatest gifts we can offer anybody in their times of testing and trial. The nation’s ordeals did not in the end get the better of them, though it looked as though they would. The psalm rightly credits these two men with performing nothing less than a rescue through acting as brave intercessors. It was an act of love on their part: intercession always is. So here is a direct message to you as a religious community. Among the many things you offer to the world and the church is your intercession. Maybe we secular Christians don’t recognise enough the contribution you make through your faithful prayers day in, day out, standing in the breach on behalf of so many people both within the church and beyond it. So I want to thank you for this “work” that you do as part of your celebration of the opus dei, for the love you show to the human race by your constant involvement in the prayer of the church. It's a reflection of how our Great High Priest bears humanity before the Father, interceding for us in our brokenness and exile and pain. 

Our hope, our conviction, must always be that the covenant has not failed. The psalm reassures us that it hasn't. Its concluding words turn this long text back from lament to praise and gratitude. Nevertheless he regarded their distress when he heard their cry. For their sake he remembered his covenant and showed compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love. God’s wish, God’s only purpose is to mend humanity, put us back together again, apply balm to heal the grievous wounds that afflict our race, rescue us from the distorted desires that drive us into idolatry and remake us in his image as people of grace and mercy, truth and peace. This is how we prodigals find our way home again and are welcomed back by a loving Father. We are forgiven, reconciled, embraced. At the end of this psalm’s long and gloomy day, the sun comes out once more.  

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For reflection today, we may want to imitate this psalm and look back over the story of our lives. When and why have our desires become misshapen, when and why have we fallen prey to envy and idolatry? Are there patterns we can discern? And then, having faced the truth about that story, how can we retell it as a story of grace, mercy and forgiveness so that we end up where the psalm ends up, on a note of thankfulness? As part of this, can we identify and give thanks for those who stood in the breach and interceded for us? How does that memory help us in our own intercession for other people today?