4th. Sunday of Lent (B)
(2 Chronicles
36:14-16, 19-21; Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21)
It must have seemed very mysterious to the People of Israel
when, later on, scrutinizing the Scriptures in order to better understand and
serve the Lord their God, they were faced with that bizarre incident taken from
the history of their forebears journeying across the desert from slavery to the
land the Lord would give them, that there they might serve Him in
freedom. It was, indeed, mysterious for them -- and unavoidably so --
because the whole episode has been found to be rich with meaning and significance
not only for subsequent Israelites over more than 1000 years, but even more
particularly for the whole future Christian people. In the desert,
several hundreds, perhaps a few thousands, of the children of Israel were saved
by looking up at the bronze likeness of a deadly serpent; and that saving
incident, interpreted for us by Jesus’ words in the Gospel, has carried and
still bears with it salutary teaching for Christian people of all times.
For God, having sent the punishing serpents to do their work among a sinful and
rebellious people, was subsequently able to turn that deadly instrument of His
wrath into a saving grace: ‘look faithfully at the bronze serpent in sincere
acknowledgment of your sin, and you will be healed of your wounds’.
For us now, Jesus says that God the Father has allowed His
only begotten Son, His Beloved, to be rejected by the religious authorities of
His own people and cruelly tortured, before being lifted up on the Cross by the
powers and principalities of imperial Rome, and finally being left as an
exhibit to suffer a slow and agonising death. Can God turn that most
brutal, degrading, and horrendous event to serve any good purpose? Most
assuredly He can, for love -- divine love -- was involved: for He Who suffered
chose to call Himself the ‘Son of Man’. As Son of His Father Jesus
was consumed with divine love for us, while, as Man -- and indeed as our
Head -- He loved His Father and our Father with the total fullness of His
divinely perfect humanity.
The complete answer to our question was made manifest when
Jesus, three days later, rose from the dead; for then His rejection and
suffering on the Cross was shown to have been but a prelude to, and preparation
for, His sublime exaltation to heavenly glory in our humanity!
Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son that your Son
may glorify You.
(John 17:1)
Look on the bronze serpent, raised up on high that all might
be able to see it, and find healing! The bronze serpent showed the cause
of Israel’s suffering, for it recalled and represented the original serpent in
Eden who injected the poison of sin into human life, for indeed it was Israel’s
sin that brought on the punishment of those serpent bites in the desert of
Sinai. Jesus-crucified-on-high likewise represented the horror of human
suffering from sin (not His own but His people’s); but Jesus’ Pasch did not end
with suffering for it was entered upon and embraced as but the initial stage of
His way back to His Father; and so it is Jesus, having returned to
His Father and been lifted up in the glory of God by the
Spirit of God, Who now manifests the healing power being offered to all mankind
against the primordial and still enduring ‘bite’ of sin and eternal death.
The LORD said to Moses, "Make a serpent and mount it on a
pole, and if anyone who has been bitten looks at it, he will recover."
People of God, it is not enough for us -- the new Chosen
People of Spirit and Truth -- to look on Jesus crucified with
nothing more than sincere sorrow decrying such barbarity, for many humanists
pride themselves on such sentiments. It is necessary for us Catholics and
all who aspire to salvation, to look at Jesus on that pole of
suffering not only humbly confessing Him to have been raised up there for our
sins, but also gratefully acknowledging that that same Jesus – still in His
human flesh -- has now been raised up on high in glory. The
Risen and Glorious Lord Jesus is the One to Whom we must commit our sinful
selves with absolute faith in His promises of Divine Goodness for our
salvation, and with unshakeable confidence in the dying manifestation of His
now-eternal human compassion:
Father, forgive them for they know not what they do
Amen I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise. (Lk. 23:34, 43)
Only thus will we come to that living hope of which St. Peter
speaks with such gratitude and confidence in his first letter:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who in His
great mercy gave us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of
Jesus Christ from the dead. (1 Peter 1:3)
People of God, the message of Christianity is perennial, and
it has been proclaimed implicitly from the beginning of man’s relations with
God, and explicitly in the life and teaching of Christ and His Church: in order
to reach the fullness of our human capacity for life, the fullness for which we
were originally created by God and subsequently redeemed by Christ, we must
leave our sin and sinfulness behind by faith in, obedience to, and
companionship with, Jesus our Saviour, present to us and for us in and through
His Church.
The alternatives are stark and irreducible: as shown, on the
one hand, in the horror of the Son of Man suffering as Jesus of Nazareth on the
Cross on Calvary, and on the other hand, in the divine majesty of the same Son
of Man raised up to, and sharing in, the eternal glory of His Father by the
Spirit of them Both.
Why must there be this utterly un-crossable
divide? Because of the divine beauty and unimaginable goodness
of God’s love for us. Our scientists search ever more
frantically for other life-supporting planets such as our Earth. There
are none in our solar system and so they go ever further and deeper into mind-numbingly
distant galaxies and stars looking for possible planetary systems to be found
there … but nothing can be found like our dear Earth … for we are uniquely
loved and divinely created in the image and likeness of God. Profligacy
in creation or indifference in our moral response to it are unthinkable because
they are both absolutely alien to the beauty, holiness, and sheer majesty of
Divine Love willing to express and to expose Itself in our fleshly being for
our eternal calling.
St. Paul in today’s second reading guides us to the ultimate
root of our faith:
God, Who is rich in mercy, BECAUSE OF THE GREAT LOVE HE HAD
FOR US, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with
Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with Him, and seated us
with Him in the heavens in Christ Jesus.
Dear People of God, the great tragedy and the ultimate wrong
afflicting and threatening our world today is ingratitude to, wilful ignorance
and defiance of, God’s love for us and all mankind; above all, however, such
ingratitude, ignorance, and defiance shown by nominally Catholic
Christians! The very first petition in the only prayer taught us by Jesus
goes immediately, as did His whole life, to this most radical evil afflicting
our world today: Father, HALLOWED be Thy name.
We all have to treasure our God-given faith most carefully as
was explained in our second reading:
For
by grace you have been saved through FAITH, and this is not from you; it is the
gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.
And I think it is essential in today’s climate in lands
formerly Catholic and Christian (now delighting in a pseudo-freedom to sin
and do whatever they want to proclaim themselves) to emphasize, in the words of
Jesus Himself, what Faith really means for us, it is Life and Love:
I am doing this because our second reading ended, somewhat
unfortunately, with these words:
For
we are His handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has
prepared in advance, that we should live in them.
Dear fellow Catholics, how ‘do-gooders’ who reject our faith,
reject Jesus, reject the existence of any supreme God and any idea of
everlasting, eternal, Life before God in heaven, must love that translation
‘that we should LIVE IN them’. Those words are far too close to being
what do-gooders would ideally want them to be, which is ‘that we should LIVE BY
them’.
People of God, we Catholics do not live by good works,
we walk in them as our Vulgate official bible, and the majority
of the best modern translations also, translates the Greek
original. We live by the Faith explained to us by Jesus
Himself and still proposed to us by His Catholic Church today:
Now
this is eternal life, that they should know You, the only true God, and the One
Whom You sent, Jesus Christ. (John 17:3)
We walk in good works (of whatever sort God has
prepared us for and called us to), ‘For we are His handiwork, created in
Christ Jesus for (such) good works’.
Dear Brothers and Sister in Christ, may our lives, refreshed
and renewed by today’s fellowship in and with Jesus our Lord, help Mother
Church bring to fulfilment His work and our glorious legacy:
For
God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the
world might be saved through Him.
No comments:
Post a Comment