Theme: Be opened to God’s Love
Lent is preparation for Easter, but our journey towards Easter must of necessity pass over the hill of Calvary. As the Passion approaches, we are invited to look to the cross. Sinfulness and human contempt for God´s plan leads irremediably to massive personal and collective catastrophe. Whereas the Israelites, like other ancient peoples, saw this reflected in history (First Reading), Jesus reveals that the disaster attendant on our rejection of God is even greater. This is because it involves a death worse than death itself and the loss of eternal life (Gospel). In his great mercy, God has sent his Son, not to condemn the world but to save it. Only our own obstinate refusal of his grace can condemn us to eternal loss (Second Reading and Gospel). Jesus was raised up on the cross of suffering as the final effort of God´s surpassing mercy to save us from that awful eventuality (Second Reading).
How can we reconcile the "angry" God of certain Old Testament passages with the God of mercy preached by Jesus is the question that lingers on our minds readily when one reads the first reading. Some early Christians did created a heresy that believed in a vengeful Old Testament God and a merciful God of the New Testament. In much more recent times, some Christians have, in practice at least, believed in a God whose righteous anger was more prominent than his merciful love.
Guided by the Holy Spirit, the Church has always maintained the divine inspiration and the harmony of the two Testaments, which cannot contradict one another. The revelation they contain come from God; it is his word, we may not pick and choose passages we ´approve´, and reject others. It is gradual and reaches its perfection with Christ; God´s ways are so different from ours that we cannot grasp them in a moment; they dawn on us through the centuries and we should not expect the Old Testament to offer us a finished revelation.
In fact, the first Reading is affected by both an idea that attributes to God human emotions, and a primitive conception of God´s intervention in the world that attributes to his direct will and action all events, and in particular all calamities. Thus the Hebrew people attributed their national disasters to God´s anger; in their view, it was a wholly justified anger, provoked by the sins and constant unfaithfulness of his chosen people. anger lasts but a moment; divine favor lasts a lifetime" (Psalm 30:6).
However, in the New Testament readings, the accent is on God´s mercy and on his positive will that everyone be saved. He condemns no one. How could he? "He so loves the world that he gave his only Son" up to death to save us.
We want to know fulfillment, we want to experience joy, to be lifted out of ourselves into endless ecstasy and to share our completion with others. The only drink that can slake our burning inner thirst is the living water of Uncreated Love. It is only under the influence of this intoxicating draught, that we will be able to see ourselves, not only as the psychiatrist sees us as we are, but as true selves from the ruins that we are now. Then we will be able to reach out to ‘other’ with genuine hand of brotherhood, to give of ourselves totally in love to the neighbor in need, because we have love to give, not just dreams to share.
Sometimes when reflect on the love of God as presented to us in the gospel reading of today, we are tempted to present Jesus as a ‘superman’ by showing how he was so uncompromisingly available to all men. We often fail to realise that he was only able to open to all men, because he was first of all, open to God. It was only because he had exposed himself without restrain to God’s love that he was able to be filled with the fullness that he could communicate to others. Without the hidden years, the desert experience (His Temptations), the lonely garden (Gethsemane), or the inner room, there could be no compassion for the needy, no love for the loveless, no healing for the sick.
To put it another way, Jesus was absolutely sure that he had parental love. He knew by experience that his Father loved him because that love was tangibly present to him day after day. The only way to be shown to love is to be loved. Jesus experienced it and he gives it out to us daily in the celebration of the Eucharist. How can you claim to love God when you have not opened yourself to his unrequited love? For many of us our love of God has never been genuine because we do not even know that God loves us personally. In our family set up, many have never experienced true love and so the vicious cycle continuous in our future relationships. Are you aware that God’s love is tangible? Open your heart to receive it because He gives it daily.
This is the fourth Sunday of Lent and we are half way to Easter. For the next few weeks, as we continue our Lenten Journey, I encourage you to focus on the Cross – the Cross that saves, the Cross of Hope, the Cross of Love, the Cross of Eternal Life, the Cross of Christ.
We are in the midst of Lent. Through this season of grace we hear again and again the words Jesus spoke on the first Sunday of Lent, “Repent and believe in the gospel (Mk 1: 15).” And that is what we are trying our best to do – to turn away from our sin and turn more fully to the grace God is offering us in Christ. To prevent us from thinking that this work of conversion is ours to do on our own, Paul reminds us today that it is by God’s grace we have been saved and are being saved. If you have any doubts about God’s intentions and how much God is reaching out to you in love, you have only to look up at the procession and recession of today’s Mass – it is being led by the cross held high.
In conclusion, if you understood God´s love, and how you separate yourself from it by sin, you would weep as bitterly as the exiles in Babylon (Psalm). God cannot oblige you to seek the light, for he cannot simultaneously create you as creatures who are free and not free (your creation is not something that happened in the past, it is ongoing). But he does not want you to weep; Christ raised up on the cross before us constitutes the ultimate effort of his love; his ultimate appeal to our free response to his love. The vision of Jesus crucified for your sins is the antidote that, like the Israelites bitten by the serpents (Numbers 21:4-9), every generation of Christians has found to the poison of selfishness and sin. Praying the Stations of the Cross – every day or at least once or twice a week until Easter – would be a great way to apply this remedy.
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