Where is your mental and spiritual “reset button”?
As I walked the corridors of my mind thinking about Holy Week, I found a file cabinet labeled “reset buttons.”
Reset buttons
We have often pressed a “reset” or “restart” button. Something has gone wrong in the memory of our computer. We have learned that pressing the reset button provides the computer with a fresh brain downloaded from the internet on high.
I immediately thought about a variety of human reset buttons. We call them taking a deep breath, counting to 10, naps, exercising, etc. They help us reset physically or emotionally. We also have spiritual buttons such as prayer, meditation, confession, and retreats, to name just the most obvious. Each helps us rebuild our internal systems.
I began to think about the first Holy Week as a major reset button God has given us when our values got tangled up in the original sin of our self-centeredness.
God’s reset buttons
Did you ever think of Noah and the flood as God’s reset? How about the call of Abraham? Or Moses and the Exodus from slavery? They were all God’s resets when we got fouled up.
Unfortunately, our spiritual systems kept getting fouled up. So, Ezekiel records God’s promise to give us “new hearts“.
The promise was fulfilled in Jesus! In his life, teaching, example, and especially death and resurrection, God offered us the new heart he promised. We could no longer say, “you don’t understand.” He experienced what we experience as we grow. His mission was to tell us what life would be like in God’s world, a macro version of the most loving family and tribe.
With stories, he tried to explain how much God loved them. Jesus asked simply that we love and forgive one another as we have been forgiven. He even taught them a brief payer… Our Father!
He invited an unlikely group of 12 to spread this Good News. His inner circle did not always understand.
Holy Week – God shows us how to use our reset button
Think about Holy Week as the most dramatic and powerful way God, in Jesus, shows us what would happen if we pressed God’s reset button. So much condensed into one week.
Palm Sunday showed their misunderstanding in living color. They could not get past their own understanding of “kingdom”. They thought of him as a king after the fashion of earthly kings. He would make all things right for them.
Holy Thursday, he gathered his chosen inner circle. After washing their feet, servants’ work, he asked, “Do you understand what I have done?” They did not! Still, he told them, “Do this in memory of me”!
Good Friday, in the sight of all the world, he put his money where his life was. He demonstrated the limitness of God’s love by loving even those who put him to death. As he breathed his last, he gave his all in fulfillment of God’s mission.
Jesus suffered and died not to change God’s mind. He died to change our minds… to demonstrate what it means to love everyone as God’s Sons and daughters, therefore sisters and brothers. Even our enemies!
Easter Sunday and his resurrection offered the ultimate proof of the fulfillment of his message.
Pentecost followed this miracle of miracles with the gift of his spirit of unconditional love. That gift brought with it the mission for all to become missionaries of God’s love. Each of us in succeeding generations is called to be missionaries.
Are you willing to push this reset button for the mind and heart of Jesus?
Click below for an early audio version of this VIncentian Mindwalk
Holy Week 2022
As usual, great reflection!
These lines below struck me in a special way since, while thinking about a tittle for a possible new book of mine, I thought “Lord, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing”:
Good Friday, in the sight of all the world, he put his money where his life was. He demonstrated the limitness of God’s love by loving even those who put him to death. As he breathed his last, he gave his all in fulfillment of God’s mission.
Thank you.
RE: “As he breathed his last, he gave his all in fulfillment of God’s mission.”
Death. Darkness. Emptiness. There’s nothing left.
And tomorrow’s first reading at Mass (Is 49, 1-6 [NIV translation]) says in verse 4:
But I said, “have labored in vain;
I have spent my strength for nothing at all.
Yet what is due me is in the Lord’s hand,
and my reward is with my God.”