+HE LEARNED OBEDIENCE THROUGH SUFFERING 5th Sunday Lent2024
There is an element of mystery in the words from the Letter to the Hebrews read this morning. Christ Jesus, Son of God though he was, “learned obedience through what he suffered”. It is thus that “he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”
These weeks of Lent are an invitation for all of us to enter ever more deeply into the mystery of our calling as the followers of Christ who gave his life for the salvation of the world. Our gospel has Jesus and his followers about to enter into the Passover Feast before he was to be glorified. His popularity had grown so that some Greeks who planned to worship at the feast, wanted to see Jesus. It had to catch Philip and Andrew off guard when Jesus tells them that a grain of wheat must die if it is to bear fruit, that “whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.”
In forewarning his disciples about what was going to happen to him, Jesus is opening the path to each and all of us that leads to perfect freedom, to a fruitfulness that is hard for anyone of us to begin to imagine. Through his suffering and death, Christ has redeemed the world, showing us the path that make our lives abundantly fruitful.
This season of Lent, especially these last two weeks of it, reveal the depth of God’s love for us. It is a depth of love into which each one of us is being drawn. Each of us is being called daily to manifest this love if we are to be truly his followers. It is the daily dying to self so as to live for God that brings about authentic transformation and health in our families and communities. As Jesus tells us at the end of our gospel text: “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.” In the depths of any of our hearts is this love that is ready at work and willing to sacrifice itself for the good of others. It is this love that gives our lives their deepest and unbounded meaning.
And isn’t this what the prophet Jeremiah has the Lord telling us when he says: “this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, ..I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts.” This is what made the missionary St Patrick an instrument of God in remote places beyond which there was no one and where no one had ever penetrated so that he found himself saying: “I am greatly a debtor to God who has bestowed on me such grace that many people through me should be born again to God, and that everywhere clergy should be ordained from a people newly coming to the faith.”
In his Confession he wrote toward the end of his : “I desire…that he (Christ) should give me ‘to drink of his cup,’ as he has granted to others that love him… and if I have ever imitated anything good on account of my God whom I love, I pray him to grant me, that …I may pour out my blood for his name’s sake..”
The Eucharist we celebrate here at this altar is a constant reminder, not only what Christ suffered for love of us but of a love that desires to penetrate every fiber of our being. The very bread and wine of our lives are to be transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ for the life of the world. As the great St Augustine understood this mystery, we receive this great Gift not that It may be absorbed into our bodies, but that we may become His living members for the salvation of all. Or as he said simply to his community: “be what you see and receive what you are” Amen
(Jer 31:31-34; Heb 5:7-9; John 12:20-33)