Palm Sunday Year B, 2024

 

(Isaiah 50:4-7; Philippians: 2:6-11; St. Mark:15:1-39)

In the Responsorial Psalm we heard that horrendous cry of Jesus:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

For a man like Jesus, that cry can only have been forced out of Him by unimaginably intense suffering.  For although Jesus was indeed a man like us in all things but sin,  nevertheless, we are ordinary people, and even the saints I have mentioned also began as ordinary people and only the gradual triumph of God’s grace over their sinful inclinations enabled them to became saintly people.  Jesus, on the other hand, began as man was loved and taught by Mary,  protected by Joseph, and grew up in constant favour with God and man and had been given the task of saving the whole of mankind, saints and sinners together: so just how deep were the sufferings of Jesus, sufferings which led Him to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Look at the psalm:

All who see Me mock Me:  He trusts in the Lord, let Him deliver Him.

It is hard to suffer unjust, ignorant, derision; derision from those whose life and actions could not stand any investigation at all: from those who have no principles, who will bend with every prevailing wind, and whose only courage is to join in with and enjoy the hounding and the violence of the mob.  But even those suffering in such circumstances, when they have been brought low, when their suffering and agony is visible to all, even those will usually hear some voices being raised on their behalf, will find some compassion and help from one or other a little more tender-hearted than the mob.  There were, indeed, some such more tender-hearted ones who witnessed Jesus’ agony.  But they were only tender-hearted, they had no sympathetic understanding of Jesus’ aims, why He was suffering thus: they only lamented like the women of Jerusalem as Jesus passed by carrying His Cross, or else, after the crucifixion, went home striking their breasts in sorrow as we are told.  None spoke up for Him.  And the persecutors laughed at His loneliness.  Laughed; but even worse, in their laughter they mocked His very thread of life:

          He trusts in the Lord, let Him rescue Him for He delights in Him.

How Jesus had trusted in the Lord, His Father!  Throughout His life He had trusted totally in His Father and He knew that His Father was totally trustworthy.  But now it seemed as if His life was closing and bringing about a totally opposite result to that which He wanted above all: He had wanted to lead the Jews to recognise the one true God they worshipped as the Father Whom Jesus alone knew and loved above all, and here were those to whom He had been sent mocking His Father, their God: “let Him save this fellow if this fellow is His friend”.

Compared to this agony the physical torment was as nothing, but physical torment it was: the cramps as He hung there; the horrible difficulty He had in breathing, continually struggling to raise His rib cage to find relief from the dreadful and continuous feeling of being about to be smothered to death.  The “holes in His hands and His feet” the blood pouring out and His terrible thirst.  Every one of His bones He could count!

We know that the psalm, which Jesus recited, went on:

          O Lord, do not be far off , O You my help, come quickly to My aid!

He did not give up trusting in His Father, and indeed the psalm closed with word of triumph:

I will tell of Your name to My brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise You. Give Him glory; revere Him, Israel’s sons.

The question becomes all the more pressing, however, granted that outcome: Why did Jesus have to suffer so dreadfully in order to complete His saving work, the work His most loving Father had sent Him to accomplish, the work of our salvation?

Jesus suffered to give us the opportunity to be free from sin.  Sin is such a horror and the extent and depth of that horror had to be shown to us. 

Think of some old person, even more try and picture an old person, better an old woman,  who has lived a bad life and one whose face now shows what sort of life she had been living for many years: the selfishness, the effects of degrading passions in her eyes and on her lips, the short temper and the vicious tongue, the greed and the hatred she has for her present state of old age with its weakness and suffering.  Look at such a person in your mind and then think of a picture of a young girl of three or four, how fresh and full of life, how simple and innocent, how charming and loving.  Such was the old woman years ago, and now, what a terrible transformation!  Sin had entered that young and beautiful person‘s life and turned her into a parody of a human being. Sin has entered and disfigured, and now seeks to ultimately destroy: destroy  by severing, through despair, the bond with God which had originally conferred such beauty to the child and had offered such hope for her future as a woman; destroy by finally robbing the body of the life which raises it above the dust.

Now that is how Jesus saw each and every one of us when He came into this world.  That is what made Him sweat blood in His agony in the Garden, that is why He hated sin so much: sin was trying to totally destroy what His Father had made so beautiful!

Through sin, suffering and death came into the world: suffering and death are the threats whereby the Devil holds the world in thrall.  Men and women will do anything to escape suffering  and death.  Modern techniques of torture can break down even the most determined and most courageous of people.  That is why, for example, spies are given the cyanide pill, or something else of that nature, to escape from the unsupportable.

Jesus had to feel abandonment, He had to suffer and to die as He did without yielding to despair, because He had to conquer for us the total threat of the devil: loss of God in the soul, suffering and death in the body.  Only by enduring and triumphing over the worst the devil could inflict could Jesus free us from fear of the devil and give us hope and power to follow Him on His way and with Him begin to free our world from the sin which weighs so heavily upon it today.

You were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your body.

You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men.

(1 Corinthians 6.20, 7:23)

For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.  He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God. (1 Peter 1:18-21)

5th Sunday of Lent Year B, 2024

  

(Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 5:7-9; Saint John 12:20-33)

The whole purpose of Our Blessed Lord’s life and death upon earth can be summed up in the words of His prayer:

            Father, glorify Your name!

In today’s Gospel account He was near the end of His life: He had performed striking miracles, healed countless sick, and possessed persons.  Above all, however, it was His teaching-with-authority that had provoked most attention from Galilee to Jerusalem among those who exercised or coveted power (John 15: 24):

If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have seen and hated both Me and My Father. 

And now, among the crowds coming to Jerusalem from all over the Mediterranean and  Middle East for the imminent Jewish Passover, certain Greeks had sought out Philip of Bethsaida, a disciple of Jesus, asking that he might introduce them to Jesus. Philip asked Andrew to back him up in making such a  striking request known to Jesus.

Learning of the pagans’ request to speak with himself as a unique religious teacher, Jesus immediately realized that the climax of His life, as God-made-man for God’s glory and mankind’s salvation, was at hand. The Romans had over-all military power to control (crush if necessary) the crowds, and punish trouble-makers; The Sadducee Temple authorities had their share of (Roman) power to govern Jerusalem’s world-famous Temple and its ceremonial worship; the Pharisees and their Scribes had assumed authority over the traditional religious teaching being given to faithful Jews, and now there was Jesus of Nazareth: whose Personal, and Teaching authority, was alarming all those I have just mentioned, exercising and coveting more people-power.

At this juncture, Jesus had come to realize that His life’s fulfilment would only be attained by His allowing, by His embracing, His Father’s authority, and will-to-bring- to-fulfilment that for which He, Jesus, had been sent as God’s ultimate response to Abraham who -- out of obedience to God – had, long-ago, been willing to sacrifice his own son; a response that leads all one-God believers (Jews and Muslims), and all Christians to speak of ‘father Abraham’ (Genesis 26:3-5):

I will establish the oath that I swore to Abraham, … in your offspring all the nations God’s of the earth shall be blessed, for Abraham obeyed My voice.  

And, likewise, fulfilment for all Jews obedient to the Law of Moses and believers in the promise made there of a coming God-inspired prophet (Deuteronomy 18:15):

The Lord your God shall raise up for you a prophet like me (Moses) from among you, from your brothers – it is to him that you shall listen.

And to that sublime end the devil himself would be permitted, in his overweening pride and ultimate stupidity, to bring about his own downfall by doing to Jesus what he had long-desired to do since having being humiliated in their desert contest at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry.  This renewal of that contest would be the decisive moment when the ignorance and hatred of sin would be cast out, and the beauty and truth of the Kingdom of God ushered in as the ruling power for the future formation, development, and fulfilment of a new People of God throughout the whole world: a people called to embrace a transformation of life, from an earthly life inexorably enmeshed in sin, into the freedom of the children of God: a heavenly and eternal life to be bestowed upon all believers in Jesus as Son of God and only Saviour of mankind:

Now the ruler of this world is to be cast out.  And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to Myself.

Those around Jesus heard Him glorify His Father, but when a voice came from heaven proclaiming that the Father was about to be supremely glorified through the death of His Son, they were divided in their opinions: some were humbled by the mystery and said, ‘It was an angel speaking to Him’. Others, probably the majority, shrugged off what they could not immediately understand and said, ‘It was a clap of thunder!’

People of God, a like division still arises today, when Christian, even Catholic, people, are faced with personal suffering.  Such suffering is inevitable in this life and we who want to be true disciples of Jesus, must learn, with Jesus, to allow our heavenly Father to lead us to our fulfilment as disciples of  His by embracing our suffering – in the power of Jesus’ most Holy Spirit – as our share in His self-sacrifice of love.

For there are certain truths in life, People of God, which can only be appreciated by allowing life to teach us; our intellect alone cannot, in the case of such truths, give us a satisfactory understanding, and most certainly cannot give us an adequate appreciation of them.  For example, authorities in free societies try to carefully avoid making martyrs of opposing factions or individuals; somehow punishment seems to strengthen, focus, such opposition, not destroy it.

Now such truths are especially prominent in matters of religion.   Our Blessed Lord Himself said earlier in St. John’s Gospel (7:17):

If any man’s will is to do God’s will, he shall know whether My teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on My own authority.

In other words, we can only begin to truly recognize God’s will for us individually, personally, by our acting in conformity with the whole of His revelation, and, above all, by obedience to His Church-proclaimed and Scripture-manifested will.   Such moral, spiritual truth, however, can only be gradually assimilated into our being by being humbly received, sincerely obeyed, and patiently loved, as an integral, essential, and indeed decisive aspect of our on-going life.

The greatest of all the Christian truths which can only be understood by living them,  is   that the Father’s name, and Jesus Himself, are supremely glorified by Jesus’ death on the Cross.  Jesus’ following words resulted from His living of that truth:

Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life,  (John 12:25)

At first hearing, those words seem contradictory and meaningless, yet they are, in reality, spiritually logical and redolent with divine wisdom, because Jesus added:

            If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me. (12:26)

Of course, the word ‘hate’ is not to be understood literally, we can’t hate our life in this world literally, any more than we can hate our father and mother, brother and sister as we read in one of Our Lord’s sayings; it is a figure of speech, a way of speaking current in Our Lord’s time in Palestine, meaning that, under certain conditions, we must be prepared to regard our life in this world, our love for father, mother, brothers and sisters, children and possessions, reputation and respect, as of secondary importance.  When, that is, their consideration would conflict with the absolute demands of the Supreme Good: God and eternal life.

This doctrine that suffering, humbly accepted and fully embraced in faith, can be the gateway to a higher and better life, is one of the greatest lights and supreme blessings of Christianity.  It is, however, a light and a blessing we must cherish by putting it into practice in accordance with those words of Jesus: allowing it to guide, rule our response to the ever-recurring, difficulties, problems, and alas, even sorrows, we come across in our experience of life as His true disciples.

We Catholics especially need to be convinced of this, that God can make the inevitable sufferings we experience on earth into blessings for eternal life for those who love His beloved Son enough to imitate Him, walk in His way here below.

People of God, when grief, anxiety, pain, come your way, try to recall what our Faith teaches us: that in God alone is our fulness of life and being.  Because He made us out of nothing, He alone knows us entirely through and through, and because He made us for Himself, He alone loves us for what we most truly are.  With such an awareness, in times of trial, short prayers – deeply intended -- are most fitting: Lord,  I thank You, I trust You, I love You, my God and my All’

Don’t look for results from Him; rather, put and keep yourself at peace, cradled in faith.

That attitude well befits a true disciple of Jesus Who, when His own agony was beginning, took His suffering to His Father in prayer. Indeed, it was by His persevering in such loving obedience and total trust, that what had been lost by the first Adam in the Garden of Eden, was redeemed by the Second Adam in the Garden of Gethsemane.  As we heard in our second reading:

Although He was a son, He learned obedience through what He suffered; and being made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him.

Therefore, surely, we His disciples should endeavour to follow in His steps.  The greatest opportunity that can come our way is the moment when suffering comes -- unasked for, unsought, unprovoked – into our lives; that is the moment when God Himself is, as it were, knocking at the door of our will for permission to Himself glorify His own name in us and through us, by means of the suffering He wants us to share with Him. Such suffering is found abundantly in family life where there are grand-parents, parents, and children, and where children can so easily be used as bargaining-chips for either grand-parents or parents, to get what they want … creating situations where emotion rules imperiously and God’s teaching and guidance is ignored.

 

Dear People of God, Jesus did not ask to understand His Cross, but He prayed most earnestly that He might have strength to embrace it.  We, for our part, cannot fully understand our crosses, but let us gratefully follow Our Blessed Lord’s example in His prayer, and in His consenting ‘YES’ to His Father, and death to Himself.

4th Sunday of Lent Year B, 2024

  

(2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-21; Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21)

In the desert, on their way from Egypt to the promised land, and fleeing from pursuing Egyptian forces, God’s People had allowed themselves to “speak against God and against Moses”  and God punished them severely by fiery serpents whose bites killed many.  In the general panic  the more devout members of the children of Israel besought Moses’ prayers and ultimately were saved by looking up – yes, just that -- by looking up at a bronze likeness of those deadly serpents, and thereby realising through their Israelite Faith, that their bitter complaints against God and Moses, had been a scandal of national sinfulness, and had brought down upon them those fiery serpents as had Eve’s sin against God’s command in the garden of Eden, and Adam’s subsequent compliance with her action – both dupes of the ‘original serpent’-- ruined their idyllic relationship with God. 

That saving incident has carried, and still bears with it, salutary teaching for Jewish/Christian people of all times.  For God, having sent the punishing serpents to do their work among a sinful and rebellious people, was subsequently willing to turn that deadly surgical weapon of His wrath into a medicinal instrument of His saving grace, willing to save, that is, those who --- looking up at the bronze serpent --- were able and willing to recognize their own sinfulness.

God’s  chosen People, for they were learning to recognise and appreciate sin in their own lives nearly one thousand years before the ‘glory’ of the Greeks’, with their love for beautiful boys,  constant intellectual searching and social experiments, and before the might of Rome with its lust for military power, pride in technological expertise, and claims to a ‘divine’ promotion of world-wide peace, could even imagine soul-destroying sin.

Both Greeks and Romans --- are so esteemed, admired and imitated by the intellectuals of our modern Western ‘woke’ cultures.  And yet, all of them were quite unable to seriously recognise their own sinfulness, an ability which is, in all reality, the priceless -- God-given to those who love Him – key to human concord and spiritual fulfilment. 

    
Jesus says that God the Father allowed His only begotten Son, His Beloved, to be rejected by the religious authorities of His own people, before being cruelly lifted up on a Cross by the powers and principalities of imperial Rome, as an exhibit condemned to suffer an agonisingly slow death.  Could that most brutal, most degrading and horrendous event of human sinfulness ever be used to serve any good purpose? 

Most assuredly so, only because an absolutely unique love – that of the Son-of-God-made-Man -- was involved: a love which permeated the whole of that degrading suffering and sublime offering; a love that can still find a home today in the hearts and minds of faithful Catholics and Christians, and can inspire  authentic resonance among sincere God-believers even today.

As Son, Jesus was consumed with divine love for His Father, Who, eternally loves those He originally created in His own image and likeness; as Man, Jesus loved us because He had put on our flesh and blood in the womb of His mother, Blessed Mary, the Virgin of Nazareth, and had been ‘sent’ to be our Redeemer. 

Dear People of God, our Gospel reading today brought us to face to face with that Jesus, when we heard those words: 

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life. 

The serpent was lifted up because it was the cause of the suffering, pain, and   because it was the cause of the suffering, pain, and death of many of God’s sinful People in the desert.  “So must the Son of Man be lifted up” because sin, the true cause of sinful Israel’s suffering ‘at the hands of God and man’ could only be shown in all its horror by showing its effects on One who was the unique example of pure humanity, absolutely sinless and holy: HE had to be lifted up in agony on the Cross, to show that though God-Man, He knew – from Personal experience -- the pain and agony of all those He had been sent to save.

Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin the world. (Jn. 1:29)

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 ultimate cause of Israel’s suffering, for it recalled the original serpent in Eden who injected the poison of sin into human life; Jesus-crucified-on-high likewise represents the horror all humans suffer from sin.

But Jesus’ Pasch did not end with suffering, end with suffering, for His suffering was entered upon and embraced as the initial stage of His way back to His Father; and now it is Jesus -- having returned to His Father and been lifted up in the glory of God by the Spirit of God -- Who manifests the healing power now being offered to all mankind against the primordial and still enduring ‘bite’ of sin and 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 sentimentally sincere sorrow, merely decrying such barbarity, for many humanists and ‘woke’ ones 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, as our Saviour.  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.
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 (1 Peter 1:3):

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. 

People of God, the message of message of Christianity is clear:  in order to reach the fullness of our human capacity for life, that fullness for which we were originally created by God and subsequently redeemed by God’s Christ, we must first of all recognise and then leave behind our own sins and sinfulness, by faith in, obedience to, and companionship with, Jesus our Saviour, present to us and for us in and through His Church today, here and now.

St. Paul in today’s second reading guides us to the ultimate root of our faith:

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 is shown by some who were or are 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 today in lands formerly Catholic and Christian, to think of those former brethren now delighting in a pseudo-freedom to sin – which, they assert, is not real, only imaginary – to be free to do whatever they want in order to enjoy the ‘pleasures of life’ and to proclaim themselves, by boasting about the ‘good’ things they now do without any need of God or grace. 

In the words of Jesus Himself, Faith -- for us -- really means, Life and Love:

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)

Dear Brothers and Sisters 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 the world but that the world might be saved through Him.