Fifth Sunday of Lent
(B) (Jeremiah, 31:31-34; Hebrews, 5:7-9; John 12:20-30)
My dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, when relations
between Israel and the Lord her God had, so to speak, broken down, the Lord determined
to punish Israel for her unfaithfulness by driving her into exile in Babylon. However, the Lord wanted to assure Jeremiah
the prophet, and through him the whole people of Israel that, despite the severity
of their present punishment, there would be a future to look forward to, to
hope for, during their years of exile and apparent abandonment. To this end He told Jeremiah of a new
covenant -- the covenant to be ultimately ratified in the blood of Jesus -- saying:
“This is the covenant that I
will make with the house of Israel after those days,” says the LORD: “I will place
My law within them and write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and
they shall be My people.”
Israel had not been faithful to the covenant God had made
with her through Moses. Freed from
slavery, and at last in her own promised land, she did not want to live
according to the Law for the praise and glory of the God Who had saved her and in
accordance with her own instinctive sense of gratitude; no, she wanted freedom
from the Law to enjoy the pleasures of the world now so plentifully available,
and to share in the licentious practices of her neighbours. To become a specially chosen people, holy as
her God was holy, was very far from her mind ... and for such a fulfilment it
was necessary she go back into servitude and learn to look to, hope and long
for, the salvation of her God once again.
On returning to Judea, thanks to Cyrus king of the Medes
and Persians who had conquered Babylon, the Jews recognized their ancestors’
unfaithfulness to the God of their fathers Who had originally brought them out
of slavery in Egypt; and the Pharisees especially tried to reverse that
infidelity and wantonness by an intense study of the Law and all its implications,
together with a literal – at times scrupulously literal -- observance of its legal
and material prescriptions. The Pharisees however were not like the prophets of
old. They did not wait for, hear, and
then proclaim the word of God, they had plans of their own for Israel’s future,
traditions of their own for Israel’s safe-guarding. This resulted in them proudly putting their
own scholarly knowledge and extravagant observance of the letter of the Law
first and foremost, while gradually losing touch with the spirit of the Law,
given by God to prepare a humble people, able and ready, to welcome and embrace
His Son-made-flesh as their Messiah. They
proclaimed themselves as the beacon of Jewish life: their own understanding of,
and exact conformity with, each and every prescription written in the Law. They had the Law, as it were, on an operating
table, and like skilful surgeons or morticians, they cut and dissected each and
every individual passage and phrase of the Law for classification and
documentation according to their own understanding; but all the while, the
over-riding meaning and significance of the Law was becoming more and more unrecognizable
to them, for, cutting the body up into every conceivable constituent part, they
were becoming increasingly unable to put it together again as a vital and
recognizable whole. Instead of being
reformed by the Law they were re-fashioning the Law according to their own appreciation,
capabilities, and desires.
When the Lord had spoken to Jeremiah of a new covenant, He
had, most critically, said:
I, I will place My law within them and write it upon
their hearts.
This new Law of the new Covenant was to be put into man’s
mind and heart to guide and inspire him – we now know it as our conscience – and
God would not allow men bound fast by their personal pride and their corporate traditions,
to act as protectors and guides of restored Israel by taking charge of His Law
in order to make it conform to their merely human understanding, so warped as
it was. God’s new Law was intended to gradually
raise Israel above the level of the pagan peoples around them and form her into
a true People of God’s choice, able, ultimately, to become adopted children of
God in Christ Jesus. This new law from
within was to be the presence of the Holy Spirit in us, given by the Father,
through His Son.
Accordingly, when -- in the Gospel reading today -- Jesus
saw this saving process beginning to take effect in those to whom He had been
sent -- that is, his disciples and the Jews in the first place, but also, ultimately, the
whole Gentile world as represented by the Greeks now asking to be introduced to
Jesus -- He knew that His work was nearly complete: only His saving death and
resurrection was needed to seal and ratify His new Covenant and enable His
Church to continue His saving work on earth throughout the rest of time.
Now there were some Greeks
among those who had come up to worship at the feast. They came to Philip, who
was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see
Jesus.”
Greeks -- contemned by the Jews as Gentiles, pagans – were
coming forward, under no other compulsion than that of the Spirit working
within their own minds and hearts, asking to see Jesus, wanting learn from Him. The new Covenant and the new law promised
through the prophet Jeremiah, the Gift of the Spirit and the Good News of
Jesus, was at work; and, having begun, the new process needed the power of
Jesus’ saving death and resurrection to continue, and therefore Jesus
immediately turned to His disciples and said:
The hour has come for the Son
of Man to be glorified. Amen, amen, I
say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just
a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Now is the time of judgment on this world;
now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to Myself.
What significance does all this have for us, here and
now? It does, most certainly, have much
significance for us because in today’s readings we have been given an outline
of our human situation in the world today.
Although Christ came to call all men and women, although
Christianity is spread world-wide today, many, many Christians behave like the
Israelites of old: they do not want to belong to a chosen people called to be
holy because their God is holy; on the contrary, they want to enjoy all the
pleasures, no matter how disgusting, of the pagans around them. They want to be free, they say, to taste
whatever the world has to offer; the irony of their situation, however, is that
though they claim to be advocates of freedom, they gladly abdicate their
freedom of spirit by enslaving themselves to self-will and spiritual ignorance, to lusting for the pleasures of the flesh and the power money can buy.
There are others who try to manipulate the Gospel and
indeed God Himself rather than allow themselves to be formed by the Spirit according
to the way of Jesus’ Good News. They
seize upon some particular aspect or teaching of that Good News and then try make
their choice the whole of the Gospel message; they rejoice in their version of
the Good News but have no time or desire to let their minds be illuminated and
guided by the whole Gospel. The Gospel,
some say, is Good news, which, for them, means that Christians should be make
themselves seen to be continually rejoicing with clap-happy attitudes which
worldly people can recognize. Others
will seize upon the discipline of the Gospel and forget compassion, sympathy and
understanding for others: strong in their own observance of that discipline
they freely give way to criticism of the failings and weaknesses they think
they observe in others. Even more
frequently encountered today is the idea that the Gospel is compassion and love
to such an extent that the Gospel has no commands and no sanctions, nor does
the majesty of God demand any reverence or humility from us.
People of God, the Father has drawn us to Jesus in Mother
Church, and He has given us His Holy Spirit to form us for heavenly life. That formation extends to and involves the
whole of our being: the way we think, the way we love; the hopes we cherish for
the future and the ideals we try to realize here and now; the joys we accept
and the sorrows we refuse to avoid; the service we seek to give and the
selfishness we try to reject. Because
we are to be formed for a heavenly life we cannot yet see, therefore we cannot
prescribe for ourselves; on the contrary, we have to pray the Holy Spirit that
He will guide us in the way of Jesus; and, having prayed thus, we must have the
patience to accept life as coming from Him and the courage to respond with love
for Him in whatever situation with which we find ourselves involved:
Whoever loves his life loses
it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal
life. Whoever serves Me must follow Me;
and where I am, there also will My servant be. The Father will honour whoever
serves Me.
Perhaps the greatest, most difficult and yet most beautiful
lesson we have to learn from the Gospel is love of the Cross, because the Cross
seems to contradict all that is natural within us. We need to learn, therefore, to accept, with
Jesus, that we are here for a purpose which is not of our own direct choosing,
it is God’s purpose and plan for each and every one of us individually, in
Jesus: a hidden purpose we have to embrace personally and fulfil sincerely
throughout our life; one that is already -- here on earth -- our greatest
privilege, and will be -- in heaven -- our supreme glory:
I am troubled now. Yet what
should I say? ‘Father, save me from this
hour’? But it was for this purpose that
I came to this hour. Father, glorify Your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it and will
glorify it again.”
In order that God’s name be glorified and His purpose
fulfilled in and through us, we have to be totally informed and reformed by the
presence and the working of His Holy Spirit in our lives. Let us therefore beseech the Spirit to form
us in Jesus for the Father, to the extent that we may be brought to cry out with
Him, “Father, glorify you name”, and hopefully be privileged to share, in Him, that
heavenly response:
I have glorified it (in My beloved
Son), and I will glorify it again (in you, My child).
(2021)
