PalmB18.   This Sunday I do not want to go from reading to reading but to connected ideas from all the readings.  For me the basic theme is that God was obedient or a servant to his own love for us.  He could not and cannot help do but what his own infinite love calls him to do.  God the Father had his own Son, come into our midst as a helpless baby, totally dependent on his mother’s care for him so to eventually submit to unspeakable horrors as a sacrifice to open the gates of heaven to us, his loved ones.  God’s almighty power is humble so to invite us to be love as he is love, never coercing or overwhelming us; otherwise we would never be able to be love as he is love.  How can infinite power be humble?  Infinite love settles for nothing else!  “He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave;” “He humbled himself, becoming obedient,” even to the point of death on the cross. John 3:16 reads: “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.”  In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus was so “troubled and distressed,” praying “that if it were possible the hour” or time of horror “might pass by him that he said,” “Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.”

Although Jesus comes into a world that he himself has created, yet he now comes dependent on the love and generosity of others to accomplish his work.  As a baby he lived in someone else’s stable.  Though King of the universe, he must borrow someone’s donkey to ride into Jerusalem.  He was to be buried in a linen cloth and in a tomb that were all donations out of love for him and not belonging to him.  For his Passover supper he depends on someone else for the loan of an adequate room.  He chooses to depend on us to accept the gift of himself in Eucharist, to open up our hearts in love for him.

However, love can never be presumed.  Some choose to love; some do not.  Despite the fact that he came into this world to bring his love to the people he created so that they could live one day in the joy of heaven as the children of God the Father, they crucified him.  They rejected his love and in turn hated him.  He put his love, his very self, into the hands of those he loved and they murdered him for it.  In the end they destroyed themselves and not him.  Judas Iscariot, despite the fact that he saw all the miracles that Jesus generously worked for the good of people who so dearly needed them, blinded by his desire for material wealth, has no idea whom it is that he is betraying.  The Jewish authorities who so craftily engineer the crucifixion of Jesus to maintain their own position of authority over the Jews reject the authority of the God who established Judaism.  Pilate, despite the fact that he recognizes the innocence of Jesus, lets the threat of the mob overwhelm his sense of justice because it seems to him that Jesus is a ‘nobody’ who is not worth the threat of a riot to be worth saving.  Because love requires the call to lead others to love freely, without coercion, God’s love leads him to be vulnerable, to step back so that those who are loved might be filled with the love they have just received so they respond in love.  Those who love will quite often suffer because true love invites the one who receives the love to respond lovingly but cannot require that response forcibly.  It must be freely given.  That opens the one who initiates the love to suffer rejection, to receive or suffer a response that is not loving.  The response Jesus received after his many miracles to cure those who were in need and after coming into this world to bring all humanity to heaven was: The soldiers “clothed him in purple and, weaving a crown of thorns, placed it on him.  They began to salute him with, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and kept striking his head with a reed and spitting upon him.  They knelt before him in homage.  And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak, dressed him in his own clothes, and led him out to crucify him.”  He showed his love for them but they, in turn, showed their hate for him.

Jesus reflects outwardly the last temptation that he hears within himself from the devil, when he shouts out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In his deepest sufferings he rejects the devil’s temptation to despair, humbly dying obedient to the Father on the cross.  The victory was his!  The witness to that victory was the pagan Roman centurion, who stood facing Jesus and seeing “how he breathed his last,” said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”  When Jesus began his public ministry, he announced in Mark 1: 15, “This is the time of fulfillment.  The kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent, and believe in the gospel.”  The choice is ours to live out.  Live in Christ’s love daily so to live in God’s love forever.

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.”

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 toteach 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

2LB21.    Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18.   This reading tends to challenge my conception of God as the loving God.  “Then God said (to Abraham): “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love,” to offer “up as a holocaust.”  Because Abraham was so absolutely obedient and utterly trusting in God, choosing God to be his God in spite of every reason to reject God, God through Abraham chooses the descendants of Abraham to be his Chosen People.   God chooses those who choose him, in the good times and the bad.

Mark 9:2-10.   In Mark 8:31, Jesus said to his disciples that he “must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days.”  Six days after Jesus made had that prediction, he was transfigured before Peter, James and John.  Traditionally we understand the appearance of Moses and Elijah to indicate that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Law and the prophets.   In Mark 1:15b&c, Jesus proclaimed: “This is the time of fulfillment.  The kingdom of God is at hand.”  The work of God in the Old Testament culminates in Jesus.  In this Sunday’s gospel it is presumed that the voice from the cloud is that of God the Father announcing, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.”  The message of the glorious Transfiguration of Jesus as the Son of God would become clear later to the Apostles after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and his appearance to his disciples.  God’s command that we listen to Jesus means that we must obey his Son just as Abraham had obeyed God.

Romans 8:13b-34.  God had spared Isaac the son of Abraham but did not spare his own Son.  So great is God’s love for us that he offered up his own Son so that we might have eternal life in heaven. The martyrs gave up their lives, because they knew that no matter how great were the worldly forces against them, in the end the victory was theirs.

 

L2B18.   Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18.  “God said: “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love.”  “You shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height.”    Abraham, having made the arrangements as the Lord required of him, he “took the knife to slaughter his son; but the Lord stopped him and said, “I know now how devoted you are to God, since you did not withhold from me your own beloved son.”  “Because you acted as you did in not withholding from me your beloved son, I will bless you abundantly.”  God the Father later did not withhold his own beloved Son Jesus because he was not looking for only obedience to his Will but also the necessary sacrifice to redeem us and open the gates of heaven.  God is love and so his Will is love especially when it requires total surrender on our part.  The total surrender to God’s will by Abraham was like a death to his own will that gave birth to a nation, the Chosen People of God.  The total surrender of Jesus to his Father’s will was a death to his own natural demand to hold on to natural life that gave birth to having human beings become God’s holy people in heaven.

God finished speaking to Abraham by saying, “And in your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing—all this because you obeyed my command.” The Hebrew people were chosen by God not only for their own sake but also to be a living lesson in the darkness of a pagan world of God to the brightness of God’s love for the Hebrew people.

Mark 9:2-10.  “And he was transfigured before them.”  “Then Elijah appeared to them along with Moses, and they were conversing with Jesus.” Jesus appears to Peter, James and John as the heavenly figure that he has the right to claim but had not shown himself as such before this.  What he had proclaimed verbally before when he said, “This is the time of fulfilment; the kingdom of God is at hand,” he now proclaims visually.  What God had begun before in the time of the Old Testament with such figure as Moses and Elijah, he now brings to fulfilment in Jesus. God the Father announces, “This is my beloved Son.”   As the Our Father prayer says, “Thy kingdom come,” Jesus brings to fruition the kingdom of God in the hearts, souls and lives of all who choose to listen to him and obey him.  “He charged them not to relate what they had seen to anyone, except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”  In the scene of the transfiguration he was making known to them the glory of his resurrection from his death on the cross, but all of that was beyond their capacity to comprehend at this point in time.

Romans 8:31b-34.   “Brothers and sisters: If God is for us, who can be against us?”  This is a rhetorical question that means to say that, since God is with us or allied to us in this life’s venture to be a holy people of God, it is useless, utterly futile, to be opposed to us.  God is so intent on bringing us to salvation that he even sacrificed his only beloved son for us.  And so Paul goes on to write, “How will he not also give us everything else along with him?”  Paul again reasserts the worthlessness of opposing those who stand with the Lord when he writes, “Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones?  It is God who acquits us.”  Besides that, it is Christ Jesus, “who also is at the right hand of God, who intercedes for us.”

1L21.    Genesis 9:8-15.   God establishes a new covenant that promises “that never again shall all bodily creatures be destroyed by the waters of a flood.”  The waters are a symbol of the force that can both destroy and generate life.  For us the waters of baptism destroy the life of sin that can come by being governed by the flesh alone but give life to those who are alive in the flesh yet draw life from the Holy Spirit.

Mark 1:12-15.   Jesus lived in Nazareth preparing for his public ministry for thirty years.  For his initial entrance in that public ministry, the Holy Spirit put him on a sort of novitiate or boot camp of living “in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan.  Jesus was being reoriented from ordinary daily village life to his new full time work of bringing souls to the Father.  Jesus proclaims: “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel.”  Our forty days of Lent are also given to us to reorient us from being lost in the petty routine of worldly, material living to the real purpose of life, the sanctification of our souls.

1 Peter 3:18-22.   While there is no certainly what Peter meant when he wrote the words “Jesus went to preach to the spirits in prison,” my interpretation is that Jesus went to those who had imprisoned themselves in a life that was lived only based on what their flesh and bodies demanded of them but ignored any or most spiritual needs.  The waters of baptism, as did the water of the flood, call for the washing away of all that is not of God so that we might have the “clear conscience” of a holiness of life.  In this Lenten season Jesus calls us to live subject to his kingship over us.