GROUNDHOG DAY

TUESDAY AFTER FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT 2015

My question to myself is, “Am I living in my own version of Groundhog Day?”

Today is Mark 12:1-17…to readers of the Gospels this is a familiar story. Jesus tells a parable about how an owner leases out his farm to some tenants. The tenants kill all of the people the owner sends…including the owner’s son.

Unpacking the text has been done countless times by people showing how Jesus is drawing on images from the prophets (cf. Isaiah’s chapter 5). With prophet after prophet being killed, it is in many ways like watching a repeating loop…even when they choose to kill the owners Son. Jesus’ point of course is that he is the Son, and just as God’s people in the past rejected the prophets…so now they are rejecting the Son. The imagery is powerful and it will earn Jesus the ire of the religious of his day.

But what if we drill into the parable and ask if it applies to our own lives—after all we are getting ready for Lent. How many times have we heard God’s call and not responded? In the 1993 movie Groundhog Day actor Bill Murray is caught in a time loop. Each day he wakes up to repeat the same events of the February 2…day after day. He grows weary of the repetition. Life has no joy, no spontaneity. After a while he loses such hope that he begins trying to take his own life. It is not until he realizes that because he knows the pattern, he may in fact be able to interact with the events in a different way…in the end he breaks the time loop and makes it to February 3.

In what ways are we stuck in a Groundhog Day time loop? Where might we be ignoring the ways God is inviting us to join and welcome his Son? There is the obvious first step of accepting that he is the real “only-begotten” Son. Yet I would suggest that for people who have made that first step…that God is not done sending his messengers, even his Son, to them, in order that they (we) might follow. So my words, I suppose of caution, are make sure we are not standing outside the parable patting ourselves on the back because we have accepted the Son…rather let’s have the courage to see what repeating patterns which lead us to shun God exist in our lives.