Lent #29:  Seven Lenten Disciplines.

Do not let your left hand know

what your right hand is doing.

(Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:3)

Before we leave our seven Lenten Disciplines:

1)      self-examination

2)      repentance

3)      prayer

4)      fasting

5)      almsgiving

6)      meditating on scripture, and

7)      marking our mortality;

let’s listen again to Jesus’ warning about how we go about such disciplines. It’s assumed that we do pious disciplines like almsgiving, prayer and fasting; we’re just to do it different—the Jesus way. Maybe the Jesus way is best summed up by his mini parable about how your left hand should not be aware of what your right hand is doing. When your left hand knows what your right hand is doing, it ruins everything.

I’m tempted to explain it; or, try to explain it; or, in some way make perfectly good sense of it. But this left hand/right hand parable, like most parables, is best left as is. If the explanation were better than the parable, Jesus wouldn’t have bothered teaching us in parables. The parable says a Jesus thing that can’t quite be said any other way. Whatever is said falls short. So, let’s just allow Jesus’ left hand/right hand parable to nestle somewhere deep down inside us where “soul and spirit, joints and marrow meet” (Hb 4:12). It’s the place where Jesus’ parables percolate.