March 11/Second Saturday of Lent
For as the heavens are high above the earth, so surpassing is his kindness toward those who fear him.
As far as the east is from the west, so far has he put our transgressions from us. ~ Ps 103.11-12
Several years ago, midway through a Psalms retreat I was leading for faculty and staff of a Jesuit high school, a young teacher spoke from the back of the room. “How do I explain the ‘fear of the LORD’ to my students?” she asked. “It really puts them off.” Those students were not alone: for most of us, “fear of the LORD” evokes the vindictive Old Testament deity of Jonathan Edwards and his ilk, those Puritan purveyors of a wrathful God who consigned sinners to the fires of hell. Certainly there is a Hebrew word for immediate, strong, visceral dread; this is the “terror of the night” against which the Psalmist invokes God’s protection in Psalm 91. That kind of fear causes us to quake and tremble: faced with such an angry God, who would not cower? But the fear of the LORD that engenders God’s surpassing kindness — a different Hebrew root altogether — is a nuanced, richly expressive term. It is not a command to terror and paralysis, but a call to reverence and clear vision. It means to acknowledge and revere God as all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving. It means, in the ancient words of Deuteronomy, to walk along the path God lays out for us, to love him, to serve him with all our heart and with all our soul. As the German Jesuit priest Alfred Delp wrote, “Fear of God does not mean being afraid. It does not mean slavish cowardice or breaking down before God the Lord. Rather, it means knowing the absolute, inalienable dominion of the Lord of all. Much in our lives would be different if more people knew the easy, simple sentence – and vividly understood – that God is the Lord.” Fear, then, means giving God his due. And when we do that, it becomes not a negative, but a positive.
Lord of all creation, Teach me to approach you with transcendent wonder so that I may carry out your will. Amen.
To hear the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, sing “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQULLJUmPSM
For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/031123.cfm
