5th Sunday of Lent B - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2018

I find today’s reading from Jeremiah fascinating. Jeremiah lived about six hundred years before Christ. Like a few of his fellow prophets he had a wonderful sense of the forgiving love of God, “I will forgive their iniquity, and never call their sin to mind.” But he did not quite have it all together. He left an inconsistent, hard streak still in God, imagining God saying, “I had to show them who was master.” People still had so much more growing up to do before they would get the fuller insight into the mystery of God yet to be revealed by Jesus.

We should not be too patronizing. Most of us still seem to harbour an inconsistent, hard streak in God – a God wonderfully forgiving at times, and then, at other times, condemning to eternal torture in hell. We image God according to our own inconsistency.

Today's Second Reading is also wonderful; yet it, too, can also present a problem, depending on the English words we choose to translate some of the original Greek words used by the author. Words like “submission” and “obey” can be misleading. What they are referring to is the approach eagerly undertaken by Jesus across his life to explore and grow ever more deeply in his sense of the inmost heart of God his Father. It was particularly at the time of his death that he grew to experience the full depth of his Father’s love for him personally, and for his integrity, as well as the Father’s equally incredible love for all humanity. Jesus who “grew in wisdom and age and grace” became “perfect”/consistent/fully human at last, stretched by his “suffering”, as the author put it. Perhaps Jesus’ love for his Father and the Fathers’ love for Jesus was like your experience as parents and spouses as you continue across life to grow to recognize, to appreciate and to emulate your common love for each other and for your children. That experience can give you a window into the hearts of both Jesus and of his Father.

Also significant in that Second Reading is the author’s comment, “he became for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation”. But salvation from whom? salvation from what? Certainly not from God who loves and forgives us unconditionally. We need salvation from ourselves and from each other, from mutual hostility, destructiveness and violence whatever shape it takes.

Again, it is important to understand “obey” as meaning “tuning in eagerly to the heart of the other, wanting to learn the other’s inner motivation, seeking to align our will with that of the other.” To the extent that we know and follow the heart of Jesus, that we really take him seriously, allowing him to motivate and empower us to follow his way of love and non-violence, then, and only then, do we begin to experience salvation.

This brings us to the Gospel passage, and to Jesus’ reassuring promise, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw everyone to myself”, and to John’s subsequent comment, “By these words [Jesus] indicated the kind of death he would die.” Jesus’ constant problem was to get people to follow him, to motivate them to change and to take seriously his way of love and non-violence as the way to save us from ourselves and each other. He knew clearly enough people were planning to kill him. He hoped that by eventually coming to reflect on his willingness to be tortured and killed rather than to retaliate [and thereby compromise all he believed in], people would be inescapably shocked into recognizing their habitual ways of handling conflict. Even more, his being raised to life and his spontaneous response of unconditional, universal forgiveness would show how deeply he was convinced of and truly meant what he said.

Why are we still so slow to get his point? Perhaps we want salvation by magic, rather than by actively co-operating with him in the glorious task of bringing about salvation.