5th Sunday of Lent – March 17, 2024

5th Sunday of Lent – March 17, 2024

5LB24.   Jeremiah 31:31-34.   “The days are coming, says the Lord,” “I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God and they shall be my people. No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the Lord.” The law that God will place within them is his very presence within them.  The law is God within us making known to us his Will.  Holiness is our love of God and his Will and being obedient to his Will.  Sinfulness is the reverse.

John 12:20-33.  The scene just before is the glorious but humble entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. (Palm Sunday – John 12:12-19) Instead of going to meet the Greek Jews, Jesus chooses the occasion to announce to the world, both Greek and Jewish, his willingness to be sacrificed for the redemption of all humanity.  He chooses to be the grain of wheat that dies and “produces much fruit.”  Jesus serves as a witness and example that willingness to hand over one’s life to God the Father “will preserve it for eternal life.”  To follow Jesus means to offer up one’s life to God as Jesus did.  God’s voice that came from heaven was God’s testimony that God was giving glory to Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.  God’s presence gloriously shone through in Jesus’s death and resurrection.

Hebrews 5:7-9.  Jesus, “in the reality of the Cross,” “showed himself the Priest, the Altar, and the Lamb of sacrifice.” (Preface V of Easter) “Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, (in his humanity by being obedient to his Father’s Will) he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”  “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.  Because of this, God greatly exalted him” that “every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”  (Philippians 2:6-9, 11)

5th Sunday of Lent – 2021

5LB21.    Jeremiah 31:31-34.  God’s Chosen People had chosen not to keep their covenant with their God.  Because of their disobedience they were punished by being taken off as captives to Babylonia.  However, God promises a new covenant that is no longer written on stone or scrolls as it was with their ancestors but now written “upon their hearts.”  “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”  He shall be and is Lord and Master over us as a loving Father; and we, His obedient and devoted sons and daughters.

John 12:20-33.    Greeks come to speak to Jesus.  Without listening to what they have to say, Jesus speaks to them as though they were people who represented the entire world throughout all the ages to come.  Jesus says to them and us: “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be.  The Father will honor whoever serves me.”  To follow Jesus means to be obedient to the Father’s Will, as Jesus was obedient to the Father’s will.  We are to no longer possess our lives as something that belongs to us as but rather as lives that belong to God because by the Holy Spirit’s grace within us we daily give our lives over to God.

Jesus was both truly divine and truly human.  His divinity stood aside to the extent that it allowed his humanity to be truly human.  Jesus, realizing the horrific suffering that he was going to have to endure, was deeply troubled and upset.  God spoke to Jesus, as though in thunder, as a way of saying to all that, despite all that his Son must go through, God would be glorified.  Remain faithful to Jesus in spite of his death on the cross.  Jesus declares that “the ruler of this world” will be overwhelmed, since by his death on the cross, he says, “I will draw everyone to myself,” not just the Jews but all the people of the world.

Hebrew 5:7-9.  “In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death.”  In spite of his immense anguish at what he was to suffer, he was obedient to the Father.  “He learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”  Jesus surrendered himself to God’s will in spite of the fact that his human body and spirit was horrified by what it had to go through.  By his total acceptance of his Father’s will, “he was made perfect” in holiness.  That perfect holiness in his humanity enabled him to become “the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”

5th Sunday of Lent – 2018

5LB18.   Jeremiah 31:31-34.  “I will make a new covenant.”  “It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers.”  “I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts.”  “No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the Lord.  All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the Lord.”  In this passage twice God uses the expression ‘to know him,’ the Lord.  I believe that the law that is placed within them and written upon their hearts, which they will have no need to teach one another, is the very presence of the Lord himself who, from within their hearts, will dictate to them the law, which is his will.    He announces to them that it is the internal presence of the Lord himself and not an external written document that is the law.  The Lord says to them, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people;” and not as so many of the Judaic leaders of the time of Jesus seem to have taken as their faith:  “The written law will be your god and you shall be the people of the written law.”

Psalm 51:3-4, 12-13, 14-15.   The God, who dwells within us, enables us to be obedient to his will and so no longer be a sinful people.  His Holy Spirit guides us to follow his ways and leave our own behind us.

John 12:20-33.  The passage in this gospel: “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life,” is reflective of Luke 14:26-7:  “If anyone comes to me without hating his father or mother, wife and children, brothers and sister, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”  I understand that these passages mean to say that we must first love God and out of our love for God we must love what God loves, and wants us to love, which is a supernatural motivation and not a natural one that says that we love our own self, families and friends because that is what comes to us naturally as creatures of this earth.  To be a follower of Christ we must love God and anyone or anything else out of a love for God.  In Matthew 22: 37-38, Jesus answering a Pharisee said, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and first commandment.”  In John 13:34, Jesus, replacing the Old Testament second of the two greatest commandments says, “I give you a new commandment: love one another.  As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”  The measure of loving your neighbor is not as you love yourself, as it was in the Old Testament, but as God loves us.  God is the measure of all things and God is the reason and motivation for all things.  Jesus said in Matthew 5:48, “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

In today’s gospel, Jesus says, “Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am there also will my servant be.  The Father will honor whoever serves me.”  To serve God means to be a servant to his will.  Remembering now what Jesus said in Matthew 16:24b that we must think as God thinks and not as human beings do.  We must daily, throughout each day, ask the Holy Spirit to put to death our natural, worldly ways and give us a life of holy, heavenly ways.  In Matthew 16: 24, “Then Jesus said to disciples, ‘Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

This section that begins, “I am troubled now.” is reflective of Jesus’ agony in the garden in Luke 22:42-44.  The voice or thunder from heaven was to show to the surrounding crowd the glory that Jesus was giving to the Father by being obedient to the Father’s will. At the end Jesus says, “And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.”  Not only did he say that to indicate that he would die on the cross but also he was answering the question that he knew the Greeks want to ask him.  ‘In drawing everyone to himself,’ the salvation he was bringing was not only for the Jews but also for the whole world.

Hebrews 5:7-9.   Jesus prays that he be spared from this cup of suffering and death on the cross but he wants to do not his will but the Father.  “He learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”  Jesus, in his divinity is perfect and all-knowing, but in his humanity he learned obedience and was made perfectly holy.  This line recalls the passage from the Gospel that calls us to follow him in his obedience and so in our obedience be honored by God.

4th Sunday of Lent – Mar. 10, 2024

4LB24.   2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23.   “In those days, all the princes of Judah, the priests, and the people added infidelity to infidelity.   Because of their sins, “the anger of Lord against his people was so inflamed that there was no remedy.  All Jerusalem was destroyed and they “were carried captive to Babylon.”  However, the Lord later had Jerusalem rebuilt by inspiring “Cyrus, king of Persia” to restore Jerusalem.  How glorious is the loving mercy of the Lord!

John 3:14-21.    “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  Whoever chooses not to believe in him as the only source of eternal life is condemned to die because they have cut themselves off from the only source of eternal life.  Living in Jesus is living in the light of the truth that all else is death that is not in God.

Ephesians 2:4-10.  “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.” Being spiritually dead is the state of choosing to live physically without joining ourselves to the life of Christ.  On one level we keep going but on another we are inert, in rigor mortis, a cadaver.  When Paul writes “by grace you have been saved,” he means that God has given us an infusion of his divine life to raise us from a state of spiritual death to life in Christ.  “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that should live in them.” When we have received a share of God’s life-giving love, we live a life doing loving good works.

4th Sunday of Lent – 2021

4LB21.     2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23.  The people of Judah (province around Jerusalem) were not living as God’s People.  Because of their gross infidelity to the Lord, the Lord delivered them to be crushed by the Babylonian army and taken as enslaved captives to Babylonia.  Much later King Cyrus who defeated the Babylonians, inspired by the Lord freed the Jews and promoted the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.  With great joy they returned.

John 3:14-21.  Jesus establishes the theme of rest of this gospel when he says, “So must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”  Then John the Evangelist comments: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  By offering himself up on the cross, Jesus is saying that he loves us so as to give us, who choose to live in his love now, life forever with God in God’s love for us.  This is the foundation of our faith.  To live in the darkness is to choose to live without God’s love and in disobedience to God’s Will.  Jesus is the Light of the world.  Without him we are saying we choose in the darkness of a lie.  To live in the light daily is to live in the light.  To believe in Jesus is to draw our daily life from his personal loving presence in us.  To live in his love means to draw life through our submission to his Will that is his expression of love for us.

Ephesians 2:4-10.

4th Sunday of Lent – 2018

4LB18.   2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23.  Judah with its capital at Jerusalem was completely unfaithful in keeping the covenant with God.  “The anger of the Lord was so inflamed” that he allowed the Babylonians to destroy Judah and take those were still alive as slaves to Babylon.  After seventy years Cyrus, king of Persia came to rule Babylonia and , inspired by the Lord, freed the captives and sent them back to rebuild the kingdom of Judah and, with it, Jerusalem and its temple.  In a sense God made the pagan King Cyrus the savior of his Chosen People.

John 3:14-21.  In Numbers 21:6-9, God punished his People by sending serpents to bit and kill some because they complained against him. Instructed by the Lord, Moses “made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole (which symbol we see on ambulances today), and whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he recovered. Jesus recalls that sign of healing to say that anyone who looks upon him on the cross and believes in him will be saved because by his dying on the cross he saved us all.   One of the most magnificence lines of Scripture appear in today’s Gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  We choose our own eternal verdict in choosing to believe or not to believe.  Jesus is the light that takes away the darkness that the enticements of this world envelope us in.  He shines on the truth that only he is, because he is the light.  The darkness of our own desire to believe that whatever we want or pleases us is truth or reality will condemn us.  Death is darkness; life is light.

Ephesians 2:4-10.  Jesus taught us to call God our Father because is pure love for us.  His mercy or love for us in having his Son offer up himself as a sacrifice to bring us back to life by overcoming the death brought about by our transgressions will “raise us up with” God and seat us with the Father “in the heavens in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”  It is by the work of God the Father in his Jesus that the saints have come to the eternal joy of heaven. By our life of faith in Christ we are accepting the eternal salvation that God has given us.  “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus” “that we should live” through the good works of his suffering and death seated with Jesus in the heavens forever.  God makes saints; we, by cooperating with work of the Holy Spirit, become saints.

3rd Sunday of Lent – Mar. 03, 2024

3LB24.    Exodus 20:1-17.   These are the Ten Commandments which are also found in a somewhat different form in Deuteronomy 5:6-21.  The initial emphasis here is that you shall respect God as your only God.  You should embrace Him who has embraced you with his goodness toward you.  Worship the Lord by setting aside a day that belongs to him and not your earthly ways.  Deuteronomy 6:4-5 goes a great step further in that we should love God with every ounce of our being.

John 2:13-25.  Jesus was bringing legitimate Temple activity to a standstill to redirect the Temple activity to center on God and not on the human activity that was a rote fulfilling of sacrificial requirements but were being done without any mind of the God for whom they were being done.  Jesus was calling for an end to those Old Testament sacrificial offerings which he would replace with himself when he said: “This is my body;” “This is my blood.”  The sign that he was empowered to replace the Old Testament Law with himself as Savior was his death and resurrection.  For human nature it is natural to be centered on oneself.  Jesus is calling upon us to be servants of God’s will and not our own.

1 Corinthians 1:22-25.  “Brothers and sisters: Jews demands signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified.” Living one’s life by what heaven values and not what this world values is the challenge that faces us when we choose to be followers of Jesus.  “For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”

3rd Sunday of Lent – 2021

3LB21.   Exodus 20:1-17. God proclaims his authority to act as God over his people when he says, “I, the Lord, am your God.” Then he reminds his people of the salvation He, as only God could do, had worked for them by taking them out of slavery in Egypt.  Next he gives them the Ten Commandments as the first step in establishing his rule over them as an introduction to giving them the whole Law or the Torah in the first five books of the Old Testament.  By choosing to rule or reign over his people, God is embracing them as his own as parents embrace their children with love by bringing order into their lives.  The order that obedience to God brings to our lives is the root of all true goodness.

John 2:13-25.  The Old Testament Law required that the Jews offer specific animal sacrifices or cereal offerings. The money changers and the animals that Jesus drove out of the temple area were there to fulfill the requirements of the Old Testament Law.  When questioned about his action, Jesus responded in cloaked language that meant that he was establishing a new law through his death and resurrection.  By the one sacrifice of himself on the cross all the sacrifices of the animals in the Old Testament were being done away with.

This Sunday’s gospel goes on to say, “But Jesus would not trust himself to them because he knew them all, and did not need anyone to testify about human nature.  He himself understood it well.”  Jesus worked miracles in order to help people to come to recognize him as the Son of God.  However the peoples’ human nature led them to follow him, not because of who he was and so to put faith in his being the divine person that he was and is, but rather to put their faith in an endless procession of miracles.  Human nature had made of the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament Law just external actions that people offered without sacrificing or giving themselves over to their loving God.  So too people viewed Jesus’ miracles just as actions to be believed in, and not to give themselves over to the person Jesus, who was demonstrating himself to be the Son of the loving God.  They were looking for someone who would save their bodies from sickness before they died, but not someone who would give them the health and holiness that was for all eternity.  God is the Ruler of our lives and the only One who can give us true life today and forever.  Jesus’ miracles were actions that said ‘make me your life and you will have eternal life.’  The sick people whom Jesus cured one day were going to die later, but by taking Jesus into their hearts as the love that is life, would give them a life that would never die.

1 Corinthians 1:22-25.  Paul wrote: “Jews demands signs and Greeks look for wisdom,” in other words, the Jews wanted miracles and the Greeks, high intellectual logic and reasoning.  Human nature puts its faith in human wisdom and human strength, but wisdom and miracles are not to be worshipped as if they were our God.   Wondrous works or words lead us to God who gives them through human beings but they are not be worshipped in the place of God.  What God makes is not greater than or equal to God but lead us to the Maker.  We do not adore creation but only the Creator.

3rd Sunday of Lent – 2018

3LB18.   Exodus 20:1-17.   Of course, these are what we have always called the Ten Commandments.  There is a somewhat similar version at Deuteronomy 5:6-21.  These were given by God to his Chosen People with Moses as the intermediary.  The first three deal with their relationship to God; the second seven, with their relationship with other persons.  Only two are stated in positive terms, whereas the other eight in negative terms, using the initial words “You shall not.”  They all deal with specifics.  My own sense of this approach is the way  parents deal with their children who do not yet have the maturity to manage their life out of a directive that is general as opposed to being a long list of specific ‘do’s and do not’s, such as Jesus gave to his disciples when he said to them in Matthew 5:48, “So be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

John 2:13-25.   Jesus found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money changers seated there.  He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area.”  “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”  As I understand this to mean that Jesus is now overturning the old covenant to be replaced by the new; the endless sacrifices of animals now replaced by the one and unique sacrifice of Jesus himself.  As an explanation for what he was doing, Jesus said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” “He was speaking about the temple of his body,” and not the Jerusalem temple.  Only later did the disciples know how to interpret what Jesus had said in the light of the resurrection.

Reading that Jesus lashed out with whips may seem to be offensive to us.  Because the loss of heaven and the eternal fires of hell were the consequences of a rejection of Jesus, he spoke and acted in the strongest ways.  When those invited to become subjects of the kingdom of God rejected that invitation and even killed the prophets that were sent to invite them, Jesus says in Matthew 22:7, “The king was enraged and sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.”  Looking forward to the persecution that was to come against himself and those who followed him, Jesus said in Matthew 10:34, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth.  I have come to bring not peace but the sword.” The devil and the ways of the world are at war with God. Jesus came into this world to offer himself up as sacrifice on the cross, I. e. to suffer violence.  The violence of hell in turn would be the consequence for those who reject his mercy and love.  Life is a serious challenge for us in this world.   Choose life by living out each day the choice to follow Jesus and his will for us or choose the death that is an eternity in hell.

“But Jesus would not trust himself to them because he knew them all, and did not need anyone to testify about human nature.  He himself knew it well.”  Our humanness joins us to the dirt of the earth.  We can live in this world as just another animal creature or choose to let God pull us up daily to a spiritual level above the world around us.  Jesus himself in his humanness went up the mountain to pray and to appeal to his Father to keep him above what was just natural and earthy.  Should not we all be doing the same?

1 Corinthians 1:22-25.  In some places where Paul preached, the Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah.  In the Acts of Apostles 17:15-34, Paul had tried to convert the Greek Athenians who were steeped in the wisdom of the great Greek philosophers of the past but he failed.  He went instead to the working class people of the port city of Corinth and received a much better reception.  Paul writes in this Sunday’s second reading: “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”  God’s infinite love for us led him to offer up his only Son to suffer and die for us on the cross to enable us to come home to our Father in heaven.  To believe in God’s infinite love for us requires that we reject all sorts of thinking that this world imbues us with.  We can only do this by humbly submitting to the work of the Spirit within us.  The road to heaven is a narrow road that has many appealing temptations along the way that divert us from the only genuine truth that is God himself.  Everything else is an alluring invitation to believe in a lie.

2nd Sunday of Lent – February 25, 2024

2LB24.    Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18.  “God put Abraham to the test.”  By his willingness to offer up his son, Abraham showed how devoted and obedient he was to God.  God in turn showed how devoted he was to Abraham by promising him “descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore.”

Mark 9:2-10.   “Jesus took Peter, James, and John and led them up a high mountain.  Ordinarily Jesus’ divinity was hidden by his humanness.   Jesus used his miracles to reveal his divinity and messianic calling.  However, in his transfiguration event Jesus was clearly shown to be the divine Son of God.  The Transfiguration was meant to put the horror of the crucifixion in its proper perspective.  By his sacrifice on the cross Jesus had conquered sin.  The crucifixion that was in the eyes of the world complete defeat was in reality total victory over the world that had chosen not to belong to God. (John 16:33)

Romans 8:31b-34.  “Brother and sisters: If God is for us, who can be against us?”  Everything and everyone who chooses to fight against God is defeated and worthless.  All goodness is ours because we belong to source of all goodness, God.  “It is God who acquits us” because “Jesus Christ” “intercedes for us.”