Reflections
Psalm 116: 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9 (Read)
“He has freed my soul from death."
It is said that Jesus called out this prayer
on the night He was betrayed, and went
to His death with these words on His lips.
The psalm is a simple prayer of thanks to
God that the psalmist might have used after
escape from the “snares of the netherworld,”
as he called upon God, “O Lord save my life!”
But unlike the psalmist, our Savior does not
ask to escape death; instead He begins to
teach the disciples that the Son of Man must
suffer greatly and be killed. Jesus summons
the crowd and begins to preach on the redemptive
value of His death, saying that 'whoever loses his
life for my sake will save it.' (Gospel, Mark 8: 31-35)
Having become the prayer of Our Lord on the night
of his Passion, the Psalm says to us believers that
there is hope, that we too will “walk before the Lord
in the land of the living.”
In Sunday's first reading, the prophet Isaiah reminds
us that the suffering servant is not disgraced, is not
put to shame. (Isaiah 50:7) It is that same spirit of
defiance in the face of death that empowers the
suffering servant to set his face like flint, knowing
that the Lord God is his help.
Because we are little and “brought low,” we depend
on our God to “incline His ear” to us when we call.
We cannot raise up ourselves; we are at the mercy
of God's grace. We cannot become divine, and
therefore God in His love for us became like us
and inclined Himself to our humanity
For this we are grateful, and we join with the
psalmist who celebrates as we do, “For the Lord
has freed my soul from death.”
Amen
Discussion Questions for Reflection
1. Our psalmist says that the "Lord has freed my soul from death." Speak about how the Lord has worked in your life to give you hope that you are saved and raised you up away from the "cords of death."
2. The Psalm says, "The Lord keeps the little ones." Are you one of His 'little ones?' Explain how by humbling yourself you have a better chance of being pleasing in the eyes of God.
Verse 6 of Psalm 116 is reassuring and beautiful to me. My translation reads, "The Lord preserves the simple; I was brought low, he saved me." I also love the wording used above, "The Lord keeps the little ones...".
ReplyDeleteCompared to the Creator of the Universe, we are "simple" and "little." However, in order to survive in the material world, we desire to be sophisticated, big, powerful, and expansive. Through temptation and faulty thinking, we are led to crave the opposite of what God desires for us.
How the enemy plays with our egos! We wish to be independent and strong. But that is a recipe for ultimate failure.
If we manage to set aside quiet time with the Lord, the world will tell us we're being still, doing nothing, not producing. However, in the spiritual world, we are actually making great strides forward in becoming more like our Lord. We might even be waging battles and winning.
The key to success in both fleshly and spiritual realms, is to flip the thinking from the temporal to the eternal. From that eternal perspective, we are most powerful when the Lord resides in us. It is his hand that fights for his simple and little ones, bringing us high when we are low, saving us from the grips of destruction. The more we bow our heads in humble prayer, the more we recognize our need for the Lord. And yes, this action of surrender, our pleading for God to "take over," is indeed pleasing to him.