Easter Sunday 2021

 

Easter Sunday 2021

(Acts 10:34, 37-43; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9)

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On this Easter morning we are gathered to rejoice in the Lord for the glory and beauty of His Personal triumph over sin and death and for the wondrous salvation He has thereby won for us.

 

If we look back to our human origins, we can learn there something of the true significance of what, at first glance, would appear to have been the utter degradation and revolting ugliness of Our Lord’s sufferings and death on Calvary.

 

God had been wonderfully generous to us at our creation: making, forming, us in His own image and likeness to rule over all that He had made in a way that would give glory to His most holy Name and provide for all our needs.   There was, therefore, a close, ‘instinctive’ bond of friendship between God and our forebears, and indeed, God even used to walk in the garden of Eden conversing with them:

 

The Lord God (was) walking in the garden in the cool of the day (and) called out to the man … (cnf. Genesis 3: 8-9)

 

There had been only one restriction to Adam’s total freedom in the garden, and that had been established when God, from the very beginning, had told him:

 

You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  From that tree you shall not eat; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die. (Genesis 2:15)

Notice first of all, People of God, that ‘knowledge of’ means real, ‘physical and full knowledge of’, not merely ‘theoretical awareness, philosophical knowledge of’.  Therefore, the prohibition was made by God because such fruit would prove most seriously harmful to Adam, ‘eat of it and you shall surely die’: one who deliberately turns away from God, by that very fact, cannot share immortality, which is essentially divine, with God.

Adam’s appreciation of God’s goodness was in no way diminished by the warning he had been given, since there was nothing in the Garden which called for Adam to have such knowledge of evil nor was there any good being withheld from him by God, Who urged Adam was  to cultivate and care for the garden in every respect.  Indeed, we learn next how harmonious and lovingly considerate was God’s relationship with Adam, for God, having taken careful note of Adam’s situation, decided (cf. Genesis 2:18-23):

 

It is not good for the man to be alone, I will make a helper suited to him.  So, the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.   The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man and brought her to the man. The man said, “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called ‘woman’ for out of man this one has been taken.”  

Thus, from the sympathetic closeness of the bond between Adam and God, Eve herself was formed.

However, the serpent managed to poison Eve’s mind by insinuating that God’s command forbidding them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had been made out of oppressive authoritarianism, and thus the nature of the bond between God and the couple He had created became strained before being ultimately determined by the issue of obedience: for Adam, weakly opting to go along with Eve in disobedience to God’s warning/command, thereby inevitably lost his participation in God’s immortality and became subject to death and suffering for mankind as a whole.

That, dear People of God, is why Jesus declared so very frequently that He had come among men not to do His own will but the will of Him Who had sent Him:

         My food is to do the will of Him Who sent Me.

         I do not seek My own will, but the will of the Father Who sent Me.

        I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him Who            sent Me. (John 4:34; 5:30; 6:38)

Jesus made many more such assertions so that we might most surely recognize the root of our human sinfulness and suffering.

Thus, there are two most important points for all disciples of Jesus to appreciate from the very beginning: first of all, there can be no true love for God in one given to disobedience, for disobedience is the root of all our evils and the cause of our alienation from God: we cannot ‘pick and choose’ between disobedience now and obedience later, in our relationship with God.   Secondly, the obedience we owe to God can never truly be cold or automatic, for that is a disfiguration of its original and most authentic nature … for obedience is essentially the truest expression of human, child-like, love for and total confidence in, God our Father.

Now, bearing in mind what we have learnt about our origins, let us look for the glory and the beauty of Our Lord’s obedient Passion, Death, and Resurrection brought about on Jerusalem’s mount of ignominy, Calvary.

We were told in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles that:

They put Him to death by hanging Him on a tree.

How wonderfully beautiful!!   The beautiful fruit of God’s good tree in Eden – which, following the Serpent’s deception of sensuous Eve and his exploitation of Adam’s indecisiveness -- had become a stone of stumbling, is now most wonderfully transformed by Jesus’ obedient self-sacrifice into the life-enhancing, life-enriching, life-fulfilling, fruit of divine bounty now offered to us in the Eucharist!! Supremely desirable indeed for the gaining of wisdom: not merely cold knowledge of good and evil, but wisdom sublime and divine; a saving transformation symbolized, most beautifully for us disciples of Jesus, no longer by a snake pierced through and lifted up high on a pole as under Moses, but by God’s most beautiful fruit hanging on a tree of loving choice.

What delight in His Father, what love for us, enabled Jesus to hold His head high throughout those atrocious torments on the Cross?  Of that we are told in the Psalter:

Blessed is the man (whose) delight is in the law (the command) of the Lord … He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither. (Psalm 1:2-3)

 Later we read (Ps. 110:5, 7.):

         The Lord says to my Lord, sit at My right hand while I make Your enemies your            footstool. … At Your right hand is the Lord Who crushes kings on the day of His            wrath, Who judges nations (yes, Father, for Jesus always does what pleases You) ...         Who drinks from the brook by the wayside (signifying Your Gift of the Holy Spirit);         and thus, (like the tree planted by streams of water) holds high His head. 

 How wonderful!!  Yet:

        They put such a Man to death by hanging Him upon a tree,

where, of God’s infallible prescience and love, He was destined to become the fruit of salvation, the fruit of Calvary, not, as at the serpent’s, suggestion to be sneakily grasped, but lovingly intended by the Father Himself, to be taken and received with faith and humble Eucharistic gratitude:

 

Take this, all of you, and eat it, this is My (Son’s) Body which will be given up for you.

          

When the serpent deceived Eve he had promised her that:

 

When you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, who know both good and evil.

Our blessed Lord and Saviour, on the other hand, opens our eyes to the full truth of our situation when He offers us the strength of His grace together with a call to repent, warning us that only those who humbly believe in Him and in His Father’s merciful goodness will be able to receive with profit the full fruit of His sacrifice and the wisdom of His Most Holy Spirit.

People of God, today we should, as Catholics and Christians, wholeheartedly rejoice!   Rejoice in God’s infinitely beautiful wisdom that extends throughout all His creation and all ages shaping all our human destinies; rejoice in His omnipotent and universal might, that manifests itself in a Son willing to suffer the loss of all in order to conquer sin and to save His Father’s chosen ones; rejoice in the goodness of Him Who knows no evil and suffers no evil, and Who -- in His only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ and by His Most Holy Spirit -- is become our Light and Life, our Joy and Peace, uniquely able to transform all evils to His greater glory and our eternal salvation.

Rejoice, rejoice, indeed, but also pray today, our world is so dramatically turning away from God to the worship of human wilfulness: ‘might is right’ still holds sway, but today, ‘might’ yet more imperiously lays claim not to direct physical power to enforce, so much as to sheer stiff-necked wilfulness to guarantee what is wanted wherever ‘persuasion’ is impossible: for might today lies in numbers: for our modern democracy is always and only most fully content, satisfied, and acceptably-satiated with ‘popularity’, sustained by as many as possible voters however young, regardless of integrity, truth, beauty and authentic fulfilment.

Yet again, let our rejoicing be truly Catholic and Christian, for human wilfulness, though perduring to self-destruction can never thwart the ultimate will of God’s goodness to us triumphant in Jesus, radiant in ‘shareable-glory’ for all who turn to Him with loving obedience and total and humble confidence.

 

 

Palm Sunday Year B 2021

 

PALM SUNDAY (Year B)

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

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The Passion and Death of Jesus which you have just heard according to St. Mark’s Gospel contains a striking passage which most probably comes from Peter himself, generally regarded as the source of Mark’s Gospel.   St. Matthew, also, when writing his own Gospel memories, closely followed St. Mark’s account and Peter’s words.

People of God, we must never forget that though John is universally recognized as the disciple Jesus loved, Peter was the one who actually loved Jesus most, as John himself tells us (21:15):

Simon, Simon, do you love Me more than these?  Yes, Lord, You know that I love You

Here is that striking passage which both St. Mark (Peter) and St. Matthew tell us:

At three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which is translated, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” Some of the bystanders who heard it said, “Look, He is calling Elijah.” One of them ran, soaked a sponge with wine, put it on a reed, and gave it to Him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see if Elijah comes to take Him down.”   Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed His last.

Saint Luke was not present at the Crucifixion and so does not record that incident in His Gospel.

As for Saint John, at the Crucifixion he was standing nearby Mary, you might say together with her, under the Cross.  He was in no particular danger, being young and somehow personally acceptable to the High Priest’s officials and able to access his home or residence.  Consequently he tells us his own immediate experience of the Crucifixion as, standing beside Mary, he was enveloped in her heart-rending suffering resulting from the violent abuse and vile mockery directed at her beloved Son on the Cross by surrounding Temple officials and servants, Pharisees, and Scribes; and of course John also took special care to mention Jesus’ words to Mary and himself.

Peter on the other hand was a fully-grown and capable Galilean, a well-known and, indeed, already ‘notorious’ disciple of Jesus, willing to defend His Lord by cutting off an adversary’s ear!  Therefore, Peter would have been standing at a somewhat greater distance from the Cross, not so noticeable in the crowd of on-lookers.

Peter had just denied Jesus – as His Lord had foretold – three times, and he was now heart-broken at what he had done: and consequently, he – Peter -- looking at Jesus from some distance, had eyes and ears only for Him, and he told Mark only the very words – the ipsissima verba -- he could gather Jesus was saying. 

Jesus was, Peter tells us, reciting the 22^nd Psalm, which begins: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”  “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”, when one of the soldiers ran off to soak a sponge in some available wine, found a reed on which to put the soaked sponge, and then hurried back to show it to the others and finally offer it to the slowly agonizing … criminal ... as he thought.

Jesus – a sublimely pious Jew, now at the moment of His death -- would normally have been murmuring a prayer, a psalm, to Himself: murmuring it, not merely thinking of it, but also not shouting it out.  However, we are told – on Peter’s authority – that Jesus cried out in a loud voice.  Why was Jesus deliberately doing the unexpected, crying out the opening words of the psalm in such an unexpectedly loud voice?  He obviously wanted it to be known that He was – at that life/death moment -- wholeheartedly praying that particular psalm.

Dear People of God, read the psalm for yourselves to appreciate why it meant so much to Jesus at that time!!

Jesus knew most intimately all the Scriptures and, indeed, every word: not one jot or tittle slipped His attention; nevertheless, it was the psalms that nourished His humanity above all.  The Law and the Prophets spoke of God’s will for the Chosen People giving direct strength and guidance for Jesus’ divine character, whereas the Psalms tend to relate the recourse to God of His poor and needy, humble and faithful, servants, the ‘anawim’, suffering from the sin ever-more prevalent and rampant among the worldly ambitious and faithless members of the Chosen People.  These psalms enabled Jesus to take to, upon, Himself, the whole gamut of human suffering, experienced, as it were, in His own Jewish flesh and blood, by that section of Israel historically faithful to God’s covenant (Isaiah 63:16):

Though Abraham does not know us, and Israel does not recognize us.  You, O Lord, are our Father, Our Redeemer from of old is Your name;

thus affording Jesus wonderful divinely-human comfort, inspiration and strength for His own dying experience and expression of human love for God and man at its most extreme.

Why did Jesus have to suffer so much?

Not because His Father was punishing Him for our sins!!

He had to suffer because sin had been afforded entrance -- through Eve’s welcome and Adam’s acceptance -- into our humanity at its very source.  It could not, therefore, be just forgotten or ignored; neither could it be one-sidedly (by God alone) pardoned away, because sin is a reality, an instilled poison which, if not destroyed in men’s hearts, will always be lurking and festering there, as Satan himself had been lurking and festering in the minds and hearts of Jesus’ Jewish adversaries after his initial defeat in the desert at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry until this very moment.

Humanity in its original purity had to reject, overthrow, and destroy Satan’s power in a direct and immediate contest under the leadership of One far greater than Adam: One loving us divinely and therefore inexplicably, unimaginably, in the eyes of Satan, who most foolishly despised Him because of such love, and because of the perfect and humble authenticity of His humanity.

Jesus had begun His public ministry and merited His Father’s manifestation of His loving approval by joining Himself to those penitents awaiting John’s baptism in the Jordan; and now, at the very end of His life among us, He takes upon Himself Israel’s and humanity’s most dreadful suffering:

 

My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?

 

Jesus wills to be with us – whoever we are and whatever we may have made of ourselves and done with His gifts -- as Saviour, from beginning to the very end.  He most deliberately and humbly lived and died among us and with us, under circumstances not always subject to His human choice, indeed, as in our case, often against His and our wishes, and subject only to patient acceptance and loving prayer for God’s provident goodness and trustful love.  Thus, He ultimately died with us and for us, that we might be able to turn to Him for hope and redemption even in the very last moment of our distressed lives.  Let us therefore take to our hearts and cherish most gratefully the final words of His dying prayer shouted aloud that we might hear and learn to love (vv. 20; 31-32):

 

But you, LORD, do not stay far off; My strength, come quickly to help Me.

And I will live for the Lord; My descendants will serve You.  The generation to come will be told of the Lord, that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn the deliverance You have brought.

 

 

 

Fifth Sunday of Lent Year B 2021

 

 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)

 

4th Sunday of Lent 2021 Year B

 

         4^th. Sunday of Lent (B)                         

 (2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23; Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21)

 

 

 

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.

Dear People of God, those words in our Gospel reading from St John sound very strange to us today, so let’s briefly recall the event which took place when Israel was being led through the desert from slavery in Egypt towards freedom in the Promised Land.

The Israelites complained bitterly against the Lord and against Moses over their hardships in the desert, and finally the Lord sent venomous snakes which killed a considerable number of them.  The people then repented and asked Moses to intercede for them; whereupon, at the Lord’s command, Moses had a bronze symbol of the snakes made, which was then lifted high up on a pole.  Those who, having been bitten, acknowledged their sin and besought God’s help, were told to look up at the bronze snake on the pole and they would live.  And so, indeed, it happened: those who repented and did as the Lord commanded, on looking up to the symbol of the snake high up on the pole, found themselves healed of the effects of that deadly bite.

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 came upon that bizarre incident taken from the history of their forebears’ journeying across the desert.  It was, indeed, mysterious for them -- and unavoidably so -- because the whole episode was laden with significance not only for the Israelites themselves over the subsequent 1000 years or more, but even more particularly for the whole future Christian people.  In the desert, a few hundred, perhaps even a few thousand, of the children of Israel were saved by looking up at the bronze likeness of a serpent: but since then, the memory of their experience has carried a salutary teaching recommending the fruits of Jesus’ death to countless millions of Christian people throughout the whole world.

The Lord sent the serpents to do their work among a sinful people and then was able to turn that deadly instrument of His wrath into a saving grace: look at the bronze serpent and you will be healed of your wounds.  For us, God the Father allowed His only begotten Son, His Beloved, to be most cruelly tortured before being exhibited on the Cross and left to suffer a slow and agonising death.  Could He make any use of that most brutal, degrading, and horrendous event?  Could He turn that to any good purpose?

The answer was provided when, three days later, Jesus rose – in our flesh -- from the dead; for then His exposition on the Cross of suffering was shown to have been but a prelude to His ultimate exaltation into heavenly glory as the Saviour of humankind.  Subsequently, those who -- by the Gift of the Spirit -- would believe in Jesus as the only-begotten Son of God, given by His Father to live among us and die for our sins, they too could -- as His disciples and despite our human weakness and all the wiles of Satan -- be raised up from the dead by that omnipotent power which the Father had used for Jesus.  Yes, for all those who would love and believe in Jesus and trust in God’s goodness and mercy, the Father could, would, and does use the Crucifixion of His beloved Son for our salvation and His own glory.

Just go back in your mind to the original event in the desert.  Imagine the terror of those bitten by the serpents: their fear as the poison began inexorably to work in their bodies; why, even those who were not bitten must have been agonized to see all this horror going on around them and hear the cries of those who were in searing pain and staring death in the face.  It was such people, people like us but in such a situation, who were told to look up at the bronze serpent. Trust the command!  Stop your screaming, stop your panic, stop your frantic attempts to somehow suck out the poison or cauterise the wound, stop even your hugging and your sobbing!  Stop all that panic, just get a hold of yourselves, and do what the Lord says: Look at the bronze serpent!

People of God, the message is clear for us.   If we are to look at the Crucifix and draw life from the Lord of life shown hanging there, we must look in a truly serious way.  We cannot look in a merely notional way: saying we believe but being otherwise indifferent and disinterested.   We have to look with the eyes of people who are deeply involved: people who are humbly aware of their own pride and weakness, ignorance and wilfulness, greed and selfishness, and recognize it as a potentially lethal poison flowing through their veins.  Such people have not the slightest doubt of their own need of salvation and are willing to commit themselves completely -- their life, death, and destiny – to Jesus upon Whom they fix their eyes in hope.

Our Lord on the Cross, People of God, is the icon of the Father’s love for us; but likewise, He is also the icon of the Father’s hatred of sin and of the Father’s determination to eradicate sin from His world by uprooting it from the hearts of all who would be His children in Jesus.

And in this regard we must recognize that the signs of the times today are very similar to those of the times that brought-on that great punishment by God of His people, of which we heard in the first reading: 

 

All the princes of Judah, the priests and the people (Today we have to say, “All the faithless Christian peoples now non-practicing) added infidelity to infidelity, practicing all the abominations of the nations and polluting the LORD’S (presence in their midst).   Early and often did the LORD, the God of their fathers, send His messengers to them, for He had compassion on His people and His dwelling place.   But they mocked the messengers of God, despised His warnings, and scoffed at His prophets, until the anger of the LORD against His people was so inflamed that there was no remedy.

Is that happening in our days, dear People of God?  Are modern ‘pseudo-believers’ allowed to profess ‘faith-without-obedience’ before God with impunity? Today’s non-believers do indeed say with modern arrogance and pride that, “There is no God”; but then they must realize that they can no longer aspire to have any share in those Christian hopes of eternal life, divine mercy, justice, and love, saintly human fellowship and shared joy; indeed, they find themselves no longer able trust in the saving and guiding presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

 (God) raised us up with Christ, and seated us with Him in the heavens in Christ Jesus; for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you, it is the gift of God (that is, the work of the Spirit, Who is Himself the very Gift of God’s own Being).

For those of us who believe, however, for those who like us, look with hope and love at the Crucified One, the Father has given us His Son’s Holy Spirit -- that other Advocate and Comforter promised by Jesus -- to abide with us in Mother Church, to be in all who are faithful and obedient, to guide and sustain them, throughout their lives.

He has already placed us in our promised land, or rather, in that garden, which is Mother Church, where the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is given to us according to our measure, together with the grace that enables us to use such knowledge for our greater good.  Of course, we know all too well today that the Church -- not Mother Church -- but the Church, our Church, made up of men and women still too prone to sin, often messes up God’s work and plans, and for that we must ever be dismayed, distressed, sorry and repentant; but we are never left to ourselves in MOTHER Church, God’s Holy Spirit is ever with us there and He will raise up from among our brethren, saints for His glory, and also -- of His great mercy and goodness -- from among us, even from you and me, servants for His saving purposes

Even when we were dead in our transgressions, (God) brought us to life with Christ.

And now, living by the Spirit of Jesus Who is, henceforth, our divine Guide, we have to allow ourselves to be led by Him -- not constantly complaining as did the Israelites of old in the desert-- but willingly and gratefully being led along the ways of Jesus through our share of the trials and tribulations of life on earth.  Ultimately, it is the Holy Spirit Who is guiding Mother Church, and it is by His grace, active in our lives, that we are enabled to appreciate her sacraments and obey her teaching, as St. Paul said:

(God) raised us up with Christ, and seated us with Him in the heavens in Christ Jesus; for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you, it is the gift of God (that is, the work of the Spirit, Who is Himself the very Gift of God’s own Being).

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done … that is what we pray, People of God, and that is what is happening in us, to us and through us, because the Father is, imperceptibly at times but always and irresistibly, bringing about His Kingdom for His children, and we are being borne along the flood tide of His eternal goodness, wisdom and power.  On this Laetare Sunday, therefore, let us indeed rejoice with great joy and deep gratitude, with sure trust and calm confidence, that the Lord has so mercifully chosen us; and let us humbly pray that we may always swim with that tide until it brings us to our home shores:

Raised up and seated with Him in the heavens in Christ Jesus.