Daily Mass Readings — Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent

"Let us therefore lie in wait for the just, because he is not for our turn, and he is contrary to our doings." — Wisdom 2:12

Liturgical Context

Today is the Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent, and the liturgy places before us one of the most striking prophetic passages in all of Scripture. The Book of Wisdom, written centuries before the Passion, sets the words of the wicked on the page with terrifying precision — and we recognise them at once as the voice of those who will condemn Christ. The Psalm answers with the quiet certainty of God's protection over the just. The Gospel then shows us the fulfilment in motion: Jesus moving through a hostile Jerusalem, teaching openly in the Temple, and yet untouchable — because his hour was not yet come. As Holy Week draws nearer, the readings deepen in shadow and in urgency. Lent calls us to stand with the just Man, not with those who lie in wait for Him.

✠ First Reading — Wisdom 2:1, 12–22

¹ For they have said, reasoning with themselves, but not right: The time of our life is short and tedious, and in the end of a man there is no remedy, and no man hath been known to have returned from hell.

¹² Let us therefore lie in wait for the just, because he is not for our turn, and he is contrary to our doings, and upbraideth us with transgressions of the law, and divulgeth against us the sins of our way of life. ¹³ He boasteth that he hath the knowledge of God, and calleth himself the son of God. ¹⁴ He is become a censurer of our thoughts. ¹⁵ He is grievous unto us, even to behold: for his life is not like other men's, and his ways are very different. ¹⁶ We are esteemed by him as triflers, and he abstaineth from our ways as from filthiness, and he preferreth the latter end of the just, and glorieth that he hath God for his father. ¹⁷ Let us see then if his words be true, and let us prove what shall happen to him, and we shall know what his end shall be. ¹⁸ For if he be the true son of God, he will defend him, and will deliver him from the hands of his enemies. ¹⁹ Let us examine him by outrages and tortures, that we may know his meekness and try his patience. ²⁰ Let us condemn him to a most shameful death: for there shall be respect had unto him by his words. ²¹ These things they thought, and were deceived: for their own malice blinded them. ²² And they knew not the secrets of God, nor hoped for the wages of justice, nor esteemed the honour of holy souls.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Commentary

What makes this passage so arresting is its precision. Written four or five centuries before Calvary, the Book of Wisdom describes not a type but the very logic of the Passion: the just man is condemned not for a crime, but for the unbearable witness of his holiness. Saint Augustine observes that the wicked are tormented not by what the just man does to them, but by what he is in their presence — his goodness is itself a reproach (The City of God, Book XIV). The final verse delivers the indictment: they knew not the secrets of God. They could not see that the shameful death they planned was, in the hidden counsel of the Father, the very instrument of the world's redemption. In Lent, the Church gives us this text as a mirror. Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Deus Caritas Est that love taken to the extreme is the Cross itself — and this passage shows us what that extreme cost looked like from the outside.