5th Sunday of Lent B - Homily 7

Homily 7 -2024

My primary school years were spent with the Brigidine nuns in Horsham. Some of the older ones still there were Irish. So I heard often about St Brigid and also St Patrick, though no one knew too much about either of them beyond a few colourful legends. One of the better known legends about St Patrick was how he used the three-leafed shamrock to help illustrate the mystery of God as Trinity. If that was the case, I hope he did not try to push the illustration too far.

Still, even the most sophisticated theological language can never get us beyond the level of metaphors whenever we try to think or talk about the mystery of God — though some metaphors are more useful and less dangerous than others.

In today’s First Reading, we heard one of the insights into God of the Prophet Jeremiah. Speaking as the mouthpiece of God, he looked towards a future where, as he said,"There will be no further need for neighbour to try to teach neighbour…They will all know me”. More wonderfully, what they will come to know about this God is that God will “forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind.” And to forgive, as we know, is simply to love another who has offended us in some way or other.

Love brings us out of isolation into relationship. And the deepest and the most satisfying relationships are those that are reciprocated and between equals. Jeremiah and many Jews who came after him knew God’s love for them. Many of them, in turn, also loved God. But their love for God could never really satisfy the heart of God [as it were].

It was Jesus who really opened people’s eyes. His deeds, and his way of lovingly performing them, had many of his contemporaries wondering if he might have been the God they knew; though for others, even the thought of that seemed impossible, if not downright offensive. But then, if not divine, what? The issue became more complicated when Jesus began referring to the God, whom they also worshipped, as his Father: “Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say: ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ But it is for this very reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”

The words, ‘glory’ and ‘glorify’, occur often in John’s Gospel. They mean something like: to make known or obvious the otherwise unrecognised beauty and wonder of either Jesus or of his Father. Jesus reveals the beauty and wonder of the Father through his being human [and even more than human]— Jesus is the human revelation of God. The Father glorifies Jesus by enabling and strengthening Jesus to be fully human. In the process, the mystery of the Father’s wisdom and love is also made obvious and knowable by those with eyes that see and ears that hear.

Jesus sees that his own being “lifted up from the earth” would be powerfully attractive and have the power to draw all to himself. At the same time, it illustrated the depth of the Father’s love as the source of Jesus’ love for everyone. The author of today’s Second Reading clearly saw precisely that. He wrote: “Although he was Son, he learnt to obey through suffering; and having been made perfect, he became for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation.” [The Greek word “to obey” is a weak translation for a response more like “becoming attuned to the heart of the other and to our own inner truth”].

It is fascinating how the one action, Jesus' crucifixion, revealed the utter awfulness and ugliness of human sin and, at the same time, the beauty and attractive power of love.

The liturgies of the next two weeks will give us the opportunity to penetrate more deeply the unity of mind and heart of Father and Son, there in the mystery of God; and to decide once more where we stand personally on the spectrum separating sin and love.

The legends surrounding St Patrick hardly do him justice, satisfying more our superficiality and betraying the mysterious inner depths of the saint.