Thursday, March 8, 2012

Reflection: The Renewing Prayer of Oppression (March 7, 2012)

Lent Mid-Week 3
Psalm 94:3-7, 18-23; Isaiah 53:1-12; 2 Corinthians 4:4-14; Luke 13:10-17


Chances are, that as Western Christians living in the twenty-first century, we don't see ourselves as oppressed.  We recognized that there have been times in our history in which Christians were oppressed and that there are places in our world today where Christians experience oppression, but we don't consider ourselves oppressed.  And that's just how our oppressor wants us to see things.

When oppression is out in the open and easily recognized, we are quick to look to God and call out to Him as the only one who can free us from our oppressors.  Our response to oppression is to rely more and more on God as "the rock in whom we take refuge" (Psalm 94:22).  Throughout the history of the Church, God has used oppression by the world and by worldly forces to strengthen His people and draw them close to Himself.  Interestingly, the greatest periods of growth in the Church have occurred when believers were most severely oppressed.  On the other hand, the Church experiencing worldly prosperity and comfort has witnessed the most dramatic declines in her history.

What's true of the Church collectively is true of us individually.  When things are going well for us we tend to drift away from God and occupy ourselves with worldly prosperity and its comforts.  But when our well-ordered worlds get turned upside-down and we fall under the oppression of financial, physical, or emotional turmoil, we rush to God for deliverance.  Yet His answer to our prayers for restored wealth, health, or peace of mind are often answered very differently than we desire.  Rather than end the little bit of oppression that has surfaced in our lives, God uses it to show us the subtle, underlying oppression that has always been there dominating and enslaving us.  More than expose our oppression, God often magnifies it so that we will see that there is only one hope of being delivered from it.

Any believer who doubts that God will use oppression in our lives only needs to look at what Jesus endured under His Father's hand to see that it is true.  Isaiah foresaw the brutal treatment that the Christ would receive:  "He was oppressed and afflicted …" and "it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer" (Isaiah 53:7, 10).  For those who would follow after Jesus, the same hardships await.  The Apostle Paul and his coworkers in the Gospel experienced it.  But, in the light of why God allowed His own Son to be oppressed for us and what that oppression led to, they endured oppression with an uncanny hope: "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed" (2 Cor. 4:8-9).  What was the basis of such a hope?  The answer is found in the very next verse: "We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body" (2 Cor. 4:10).

Through the oppressive death of Jesus, God freed us from the oppression of sin, death, and Satan.  In Baptism we were joined with Christ in His death where our oppression ended and the oppressor lost his claim on us.  We have been freed from his oppression to live the new life that Christ has won for us.  In this new life we cannot be crushed, do not despair, will never be abandoned, and cannot be destroyed no matter how oppressed our earthly lives become, because God has answered the prayers of His oppressed people with the deliverance that Christ has secured for us with His blood.  "By his wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5) and have been delivered from oppression forever.

Audio file of the homily based on this reflection

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