Ribbon Placement:

Office of Readings for Thursday of the 4th Week of Lent

God, come to my assistance.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:

HYMN

I am the Lord bringing light through the cloud

I am the Lord bringing light through the cloud

PSALMODY

Ant. 1 Their own strength could not save them; it was your strength and the light of your face.

Psalm 44

I

We heard with our own ears, O God,

To plant them you uprooted the nations:

It is you, my king, my God,

For it was not in my bow that I trusted

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:

Ant. Their own strength could not save them; it was your strength and the light of your face.

Ant. 2 Turn back to the Lord; he will not hide his face.

II

Yet now you have rejected us, disgraced us:

You make us like sheep for the slaughter

You make us the taunt of our neighbors,

All day long my disgrace is before me:

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:

Ant. Turn back to the Lord; he will not hide his face.

Ant. 3 Arise, Lord, do not abandon us for ever.

III

This befell us though we had not forgotten you;

Had we forgotten the name of our God

Awake, O Lord, why do you sleep?

For we are brought down low to the dust;

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:

Psalm-prayer

Lord Jesus, you foretold that we would share in the persecutions that brought you to a violent death. The Church formed at the cost of your precious blood is even now conformed to your Passion; may it be transformed, now and eternally, by the power of your resurrection.

Ant. Arise, Lord, do not abandon us for ever.

Sacred Silence (indicated by a bell) – a moment to reflect and receive in our hearts the full resonance of the voice of the Holy Spirit and to unite our personal prayer more closely with the word of God and public voice of the Church.

Whoever meditates on the law of the Lord.

READINGS

First reading

The people set out from Hazeroth and encamped in the desert of Paran.

The Lord said to Moses, “Send men to reconnoiter the land of Canaan, which I am giving the Israelites. You shall send one man from each ancestral tribe, all of them princes.” So Moses dispatched them from the desert of Paran, as the Lord had ordered. All of them were leaders among the Israelites.

In sending them to reconnoiter the land of Canaan, Moses said to them, “Go up here in the Negeb, up into the highlands, and see what kind of land it is. Are the people living there strong or weak, few or many? Is the country in which they live good or bad? Are the towns in which they dwell open or fortified? Is the soil fertile or barren, wooded or clear? And do your best to get some fruit of the land.” It was then the season for early grapes.

So they went up and reconnoitered the land from the desert of Zin as far as where Rehob adjoins Labo of Hamath. Going up by way of the Negeb, they reached Hebron, where Ahiman, Sheshai and Talmai, descendants of the Anakim, were living. [Hebron had been built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.] They also reached the Wadi Eshcol, where they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes on it, which two of them carried on a pole, as well as some pomegranates and figs. It was because of the cluster the Israelites cut there that they called the place Wadi Eshcol.

After reconnoitering the land for forty days they returned, met Moses and Aaron and the whole community of the Israelites in the desert of Paran at Kadesh, made a report to them all, and showed them the fruit of the country. They told Moses: “We went into the land to which you sent us. It does indeed flow with milk and honey, and here is its fruit.

However, the people who are living in the land are fierce, and the towns are fortified and very strong. Besides, we saw descendants of the Anakim there. Amalekites live in the region of the Negeb; Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites dwell in the highlands, and Canaanites along the seacoast and the banks of the Jordan.”

Caleb, however, to quiet the people toward Moses, said, “We ought to go up and seize the land, for we can certainly do so.” But the men who had gone up with him said, “We cannot attack these people; they are too strong for us.”

So they spread discouraging reports among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The land that we explored is a country that consumes its inhabitants. And all the people we saw there are huge men, veritable giants [the Anakim were a race of giants]; we felt like mere grasshoppers, and so we must have seemed to them.”

RESPONSORY Deuteronomy 1:31, 32, 26, 27

The Lord your God carried you in the desert, as a man carries his child,

You refused to go up to the land he had promised you, you defied the Lord your God.

Second reading

True reverence for the Lord’s passion means fixing the eyes of our heart on Jesus crucified and recognizing in him our own humanity.

The earth — our earthly nature — should tremble at the suffering of its Redeemer. The rocks — the hearts of unbelievers — should burst asunder. The dead, imprisoned in the tombs of their mortality, should come forth, the massive stones now ripped apart. Foreshadowings of the future resurrection should appear in the holy city, the Church of God: what is to happen to our bodies should now take place in our hearts.

No one, however weak, is denied a share in the victory of the cross. No one is beyond the help of the prayer of Christ. His prayer brought benefit to the multitude that raged against him. How much more does it bring to those who turn to him in repentance. Ignorance has been destroyed, obstinacy has been overcome. The sacred blood of Christ has quenched the flaming sword that barred access to the tree of life. The age-old night of sin has given place to the true light.

The Christian people are invited to share the riches of paradise. All who have been reborn have the way open before them to return to their native land, from which they had been exiled. Unless indeed they close off for themselves the path that could be opened before the faith of a thief.

The business of this life should not preoccupy us with its anxiety and pride, so that we no longer strive with all the love of our heart to be like our Redeemer, and to follow his example. Everything that he did or suffered was for our salvation: he wanted his body to share the goodness of its head.

First of all, in taking our human nature while remaining God, so that the Word became man, he left no member of the human race, the unbeliever excepted, without a share in his mercy. Who does not share a common nature with Christ if he has welcomed Christ, who took our nature, and is reborn in the Spirit through whom Christ was conceived?

Again, who cannot recognize in Christ his own infirmities? Who would not recognize that Christ’s eating and sleeping, his sadness and his shedding of tears of love are marks of the nature of a slave?

It was this nature of a slave that had to be healed of its ancient wounds and cleansed of the defilement of sin. For that reason the only-begotten Son of God became also the son of man. He was to have both the reality of a human nature and the fullness of the godhead.

The body that lay lifeless in the tomb is ours. The body that rose again on the third day is ours. The body that ascended above all the heights of heaven to the right hand of the Father’s glory is ours. If then we walk in the way of his commandments, and are not ashamed to acknowledge the price he paid for our salvation in a lowly body, we too are to rise to share his glory. The promise he made will be fulfilled in the sight of all: Whoever acknowledges me before men, I too will acknowledge him before my Father who is in heaven.

RESPONSORY 1 Corinthians 1:18, 23

To those who are on the way to destruction, the message of the cross is foolishness;

We preach a crucified Christ: an obstacle to the Jews, sheer madness to the Gentiles.

CONCLUDING PRAYER

We invoke your mercy in humble prayer, O Lord,

ACCLAMATION (at least in the communal celebration)

Let us praise the Lord.