Passiontide

Passion Sunday “C” – April 7, 2019

Frackville, From the Pastor /

There’s a great deal of making rushed judgments and demanding immediate answers in today’s Gospel. Only Jesus seems to take the time carefully to read the whole situation. He bends down and starts doodling in the dust, pondering, reflecting, seeing the wider picture. The woman is merely a means to an end; they have no interest in her – they just want to trap Jesus. Is He going to agree with the law, thereby sacrificing the woman’s life and undermining His reputation as a man with a message of the boundless compassion of God for all, even sinners? The Pharisees want a “yes”or “no”answer to a question of moral law, as if they were dealing with a math problem. But when it comes to people’s lives, things are seldom so clear-cut. We know nothing of the woman’s circumstances, nothing of the man she was with, or why she was with him. Context is everything. Jesus is aware of their motives. But also, He is aware of the person involved. They separate her from the rest of the people. It’s easier to judge and condemn someone who is singled our as different, other, not one of us. They isolate the woman. Jesus doesn’t the exact opposite; He connects her to them. Whatever the reason for the woman’s adultery, whether she was victim or wrongdoer, Jesus’ response, “If there is one of you who has not sinned, let him be the first to throw a stone.” For who has not committed sin? Who doesn’t stand in need of the mercy of God? Once that connection is made, it becomes impossible for anyone to condemn the woman, for in doing so they would be condemning themselves. Jesus reminds them – us – of what unites us as human beings; and when that happens, compassion and mercy become not just possible, but the only options left open.

Mercy is life-giving and transforms us so that, like the woman in the Gospel, we cease to live in isolation, held captive by our history. When we truly experience God’s mercy, it’s not just our view of ourselves that is transformed, but our understanding of humanity and our place in it. Judgment and condemnation are replaced by compassionate awareness of our solidarity and communion with the whole human family.

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Passion Sunday (“B”) – March 18, 2018

Frackville, From the Pastor /

As Jeremiah describes it, the Lord will plant His Law deep within us, writing it on our hearts. It is seen as God’s response to our failure to keep the covenant. Instead of punishment God forgives our iniquity and never calls our sin to mind, giving us an image of God that will be taken up by the person of Jesus. In the synoptic Gospels Jesus faces His death with the agony in the garden, where He is described as struggling with what is being asked of Him by God His Father. Today from St. John’s Gospel we see Jesus troubled in similar fashion. The difference is that in St. John’s vision this testing is seen in itself to be the hour in which the Son of Man is glorified, a view that is underlined by the voice from heaven, like a clap of thunder, declaring, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The symbol Jesus offers us is that of the wheat grain that falls on the ground and dies. It is only by falling on the ground and dying that the grain can yield a rich harvest.

Most of us will not be asked to take extreme steps in our lives. We will, however, be asked to take such steps in many little ways every day of our lives. How do we develop the ability to take such decisions? How do we create a framework in our lives that will help us respond with the same generosity that we see in Jesus and His followers? We find Jesus in dialogue with others and with himself. And we know that before any major decision He retired to be by himself or with a few special disciples to pray. These too create the framework for our own decision-making. We don’t get on the right track out of the blue. It is through prayer, open discussion and the sacraments that we prepare ourselves constantly for whatever decisions will be asked of us, especially the decisions that will demand generosity and self-sacrifice on our part. There is the vision too of the wider cause we serve, the world in all its variety that always awaits the healing touch of Christ.

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Passion Sunday (“A”) – April 2, 2017

From the Pastor /

Today Jesus talks about death not in cosmic apocalyptic events but in close loving relationships. Martha and Mary inform Him about their brother Lazarus, whom Jesus loves. At first Jesus seems indifferent and delays going to help then reassures them that the illness will not end in death. Jesus speaks powerful words, which we often hear at funerals: “ I am the resurrection and the life. If anyone believes in Me, even though he dies he will live.” Jesus is moved to tears by the grief of those He loves and angry at the reality of death in His friend. But then He performs the greatest sign of His ministry as He calls Lazarus from the grave. And Lazarus is freed from death.

The raising of Lazarus is the greatest sign Jesus performs but, like the other signs we have seen in Lent, the giving of “living water” to a thirsty woman and sight to a blind man, it points to the greater reality of the resurrection, which we celebrate at Easter. Lazarus was raised from the dead but he had to die again. He would need again the funeral clothes that are cast aside when Jesus rises on the third day. At the resurrection Jesus conquers death. On the last day we believe that Christ will come again in glory to bring His creation to share fully in His resurrection.

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Passion Sunday (C) – March 13, 2016

From the Pastor /

We are moving towards the end of lent, a season of repentance traditionally seen as a time for “giving up” something, of fasting, giving away and prayer. In the light of God’s word to us today, we can reflect on how these are all ways of “letting go” of the things that so often ensnare us, of our own needs and appetites, our own self-determination even.

It is a good exercise, at this time of our year, to spend a little time reflecting on what in our past we are still holding on to, in ways that hold us back from following Jesus more fully. There may be sins, long forgiven, but which still shape our thinking and behavior; our routines and disciplines that were once life-giving and helpful, but which are now empty and deadening. For all of us there will be things we are being called to leave behind so as do be freer still to walk with our Lord. To identify some small way in which we could take a step away from these past burdens and towards God’s “new thing” in our life is the Lenten invitation for the coming week. It is such a letting go that will enable us to respond to the freedom Jesus offers us in His compassion and forgiveness: He lets go of our past sins and difficulties, but we are called to do so too. Then we can be free to follow Him into a new life, confident in His companionship.

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Passion Sunday – “B” – March 22, 2015

From the Pastor /

Today’s passage from Jeremiah begins, “See, the days are coming…” The second reading, from the letter to the Hebrews, speaks of Christ looking beyond His life on earth. In the Gospel, Jesus says that “the hour has come.” We still live in that “hour;” it is still unfolding in our lives.

Our lives are full of small deaths, and small resurrections. When we confess our sins, when we join with Christ in His Eucharist, when we make sacrifices and take risks for His sake, then something in us dies and something new is born again. We can live many years without allowing this death and resurrection to take place in our lives. We may not choose to change, but sometimes it is outside circumstances that force a change on us. This can be the grace of God for us, but only if we have faith and hope. If we lived our lives in a perpetual winter, and all living memory had forgotten the spring, how shocked we would be when a new spring finally came. We would call it the death of winter, unable to imagine that this was not death but a newness of life. St. Paul tells us that we are to walk in that newness of life. Christ walked into the greatest darkness possible, the rejection of salvation itself, yet He entered into that darkness and faced up to it with His human emotions, showing that fear is to be overcome by hope and love.

The art of travel is knowing what to pack, but the experienced traveler will also know what to pack. We will gain more from Lent if we see it as not just a temporary giving up of things but rather training in letting go of everything that holds us up on the journey to the kingdom. Jesus teaches us to travel lightly. In Lent we can learn something about how demanding the journey to eternal happiness can be. It may not be material things that we’re called to let go of. We may need to let go of attitudes, emotional blinds, compulsions, automatic responses to situations; in short, the false sense of self that hides the true self which is being created in Christ. Now in these last two weeks of Lent, we can consider the magnitude of the journey Christ has asked us to pursue. Yet it is not a journey we make on our own; if we look ahead, He is there, and we follow.

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Passion Sunday – “A” – April 6, 2014

From the Pastor /

What makes the tears of Jesus particularly striking is that they were not simply an emotional reaction. His emotions are perfectly integrated with His reason, and His reason is undamaged by sin, Jesus always sees to the very causes of all the sin and suffering in the world. One of those causes is, as srcipture tells us, the work of the devil. Tears by themselves, of course do not raise the dead. But because Jesus is also divine, He was, and is, able not merely to return life to a corpse, but truly to resurrect us all.

How do we apply all this to our lives? Part of the good news is that in the first place we don’t have to. In the first place God applies it all to us. Our part is to respond to and nourish this life of grace, to make the Holy Spirit welcome in our hearts and minds. By living a sacramental life in the Church, we are nourished by the sacraments and prayer and good works. But we can always do more to appreciate what God is doing with us.

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