Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion

                                    

 

Agony in the Garden
Stained Glass Window
Assumption Church
Fairfield CT*

Today's  reading of the Passion of our Lord is one of the highlights of the Church year. This year we heard St. Matthew's account of the Passion. Next year we will hear St. Mark's account and the year after we will have St. Luke's account. Of course, on Good Friday we always have the Passion according to St. John. Although each of the Evangelists approaches the life of Christ in a different way, they draw very close to each other when it comes to the Passion.

The narrative of the Passion seems like a great drama with a cast of characters with whom we can all identify. If we could be in the drama, what role would we play? Would we be like the disciples who fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane? or would we be part of the crowd who mocked and taunted Jesus only a short time after cheering Him and waiving palm branches?

Maybe we would like a more important role. We could be Pontius Pilate who condemned Jesus, or Peter who denied Him, or even Judas who betrayed Him. Still, it is clear from today's readings that we are supposed to play the part of Jesus, Himself. The Church has always recognized that in His Passion and Death our Lord gave us an example which we must follow. Many times during His time on Earth Jesus said, "Follow Me”. Many times He urged us to take up our cross and follow Him.

Today's readings show that it is through the practice of humility and self sacrifice that we come to follow the Lord. Matthew begins his account of the Passion at the Last Supper. There Jesus told the disciples that He would give up His body and blood for us all, and that they should share in this sacrifice. When He asks us at every Mass to eat His Body and drink His Blood, he is also asking us to share in His sacrifice on Calvary.

Today's first reading is about humility and self sacrifice.

            I gave my back to those who beat me,

            my cheeks to those who plucked my beard;

            my face I did not shield

            from buffets and spitting.

St. Paul in the letter to the Philippians says that Jesus "humbled Himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross."

This is the point of all of our little sacrifices during Lent. Everything that we gave up or did was to remind ourselves that we do not live just for ourselves.  Humility means giving up our own pride and ambition for the sake of others. Didn't our Lord say that we must deny ourselves in order to save ourselves? that we must lose our life in order to find it?

Our Lord was a great teacher but the Passion shows us that He taught by example.

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Reading 1. Isaiah 50: 4-7

Reading II. Philippians 2: 6-11

Gospel. Matthew 26: 14--27: 66 (the Passion).

* Image by Melissa DeStefano

Raising of Lazarus

                                    5th Sunday of Lent

                                    

 

Giotto: Raising of Lazarus
Scrovegni Chapel, Padua

Today’s first reading is from the book of the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel is an unusual prophet because his words are spoken in a land far away from Jerusalem or Judea. He along with the remains of the Jewish nation had been taken captive and enslaved after their homeland had been conquered and destroyed by foreigners. In a way Ezekiel and his fellow captives were the lucky ones since many of their people had died in the invasion.

Today’s reading is part of one of the most famous passages in the Hebrew Scriptures. The prophet has a vision of a vast, dry, desert valley filled with bones. Suddenly at the word of the Lord the bones arise and are covered with flesh, and the Spirit of the Lord breathes life into them. Scholars tell us that Ezekiel is speaking of a future time when his people as a nation will rise and return to their homeland. The Lord says, “I will put my spirit in you that you may live.’

Is it any wonder that the Church uses this prophecy to introduce today’s gospel account of the raising of Lazarus from the dead? The gospel of St. John is filled with signs. Last week we saw that our Lord gave sight to the beggar, blind from birth, to indicate that He was the Light of the world. We saw how as a result of this great miracle, the leaders of the people began to plot against Jesus. He was forced to leave Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, when Jesus hears that his dear friend, Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, is ill, He decides to return to Judea. On the way He realizes that Lazarus has died, but resolves to perform the greatest of His signs.

He said this, and then told them, “Our friend Lazarus is asleep,but I am going to awaken him.”

As they say, the rest of the story is history. Not only did Jesus come to bring ‘light’ to the world, the raising of Lazarus was a sign that He came to bring ‘life’ to the world.

I am the resurrection and the life;whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live,and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.

He went to the tomb and cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” St. John tells us that after this incredible sign many came to believe but when Jesus gave new life to Lazarus, he sealed His own death warrant. He came to give life but now those who cannot believe plot to kill Him. Next week on Palm Sunday we will hear the story of His Passion and Death.

In this last week of Lent it might be good for us to consider the words of St. Paul in today’s second reading. He says, “Those who are “in the flesh cannot please God.” By “in the flesh,” St. Paul means living in a kind of captivity such as experienced by those Israelites who had been enslaved along with Ezekiel. In another place Paul describes the works of the flesh as ‘immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like.”

Paul contrasts those works with the fruits of the Spirit, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Isn’t it obvious that any of us who could be freed from the captivity of the “flesh” and who could enter into the life of the Spirit would have been raised from the dead?

But if Christ is in you, Although the body is dead because of sin, The spirit is alive because of righteousness.

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Reading 1. Ezekiel 37: 12-14

Reading II. Romans 8: 8-11

Gospel. John 11: 1-45 (raising of Lazarus).

Jesus and the Man Born Blind

                                    4th Sunday of Lent

                                    

 Since Lent began the first reading for each Sunday has presented us with great figures from the Old Testament. First, there was the story of Adam and Eve. Then we heard the story of the calling of Abraham, the father of Israel. Last week"s reading was about Moses, the deliverer of his people from captivity. Today's reading is about David, the greatest of the kings of Israel. 

But David was not always a great king. Today we see him as the youngest and the least of the many sons of Jesse. Nevertheless, David is chosen over his brothers because,

            Not as man sees does God see,

            because man sees the appearance

            but the Lord looks into the heart.

Today's gospel also deals with a nobody, the poor beggar, blind from birth. I would love to see a film depicting this incident. It would take a great comic actor to portray the role of the blind beggar. In my mind I can visualize Roberto Benigni, the greatest Italian comic actor of our time, in the role. Who can forget his exuberant performance in the Academy Award winner, Life Is Beautiful, or his even more exuberant performance at the ceremony when he won the award.

Roberto Benigni

It is not hard to understand the emotional roller coaster of the blind beggar in today’s gospel.  A man he cannot even see has made a paste of clay and spittle and told him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. He washes and miraculously begins to see for the first time in his life. What’s the result? People can’t believe their own eyes. They can’t even believe that he is the same person. Then he is dragged into court and interrogated by officials who also refuse to believe their own eyes.

The officials next question the beggar’s parents who testify that their son had indeed been blind from birth In a way, they are also on trial since it was believed that their son’s blindness was also the result of their sin. We may think that blaming the parents for the son’s blindness is an outmoded and superstitious concept. Yet, still today many people blame their parents for what has gone wrong with their lives. Even worse, many counsellors and psychologists will encourage disturbed people to look back and blame others for their plight and not consider their own responsibility.

Even before he had healed the blind man, Jesus had emphatically denied that physical blindness was the result of sin. He continually insisted that sickness or accidents were not caused by sin but that sin was the result of turning away from the spiritual truth that had been implanted in all our hearts.

The real sin of the Pharisees was in refusing to see what God had done for the blind man. It was as if they would have preferred him to remain in darkness instead of rejoicing at his miraculous gift of sight. Today’s readings are all about seeing and not seeing, about light and darkness. As St. Paul says in the second reading,

Live as children of light,

For light produces every kind of goodness

And righteousness and truth

The Pharisees are still among us. In fact, we are all prone to see things as they did and to ignore the evidence of our own two eyes. I would like to end with a statement by Anna Jameson, a very great lady of the nineteenth century, who suffered much in her own life. She refliected on a sermon that she had heard in church by a preacher whose preaching sounded like the Pharisees.

He is really sublime, this man! with his faith in “the religion of pain,” and “the deification of sorrow!” But is he therefore right? What has he preached to us to-day with all the force of eloquence, all the earnestness of conviction? that “pain is the life of God as shown forth in Christ;”—“that we are to be crucified to the world and the world to us.” This perpetual presence of a crucified God between us and a pitying redeeming Christ, leads many a mourner to the belief that this world is all a Golgotha of pain, and that we are here to crucify each other. Is this the law under which we are to live and strive?

 Surely there is a great difference between the resignation or the endurance of a truthful, faithful, loving, hopeful spirit, and this dreadful theology of suffering as the necessary and appointed state of things! I, for one, will not accept it. Even while most miserable, I will believe in happiness; even while I do or suffer evil, I will believe in goodness; even while my eyes see not through tears, I will believe in the existence of what I do not see—that God is benign, that nature is fair, that the world is not made as a prison or a penance. While I stand lost in utter darkness, I will yet wait for the return of the unfailing dawn,—even though my soul be amazed into such a blind perplexity that I know not on which side to look for it, and ask “where is the East? and whence the dayspring?” For the East holds its wonted place, and the light is withheld only till its appointed time.

 God so strengthen me that I may think of pain and sin only as accidental apparent discords in his great harmonious scheme of good! Then I am ready—I will take up the cross, and hear it bravely, while I must; but I will lay it down when I can, and in any case I will never lay it on another.

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Reading 1. 1 Samuel 16: 1b, 6-7, 10-13a

Reading II. Ephesians 5: 8-14

Gospel. John 4: 9: 1-41 (the man born blind).

Samaritan Woman at the Well

                                    3rd Sunday of Lent

                                  

On this third Sunday in our Lenten season the readings all deal with the subject of faith. Even the responsorial Psalm says, "If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts." This saying is always associated with the famous incident at Massah and Meribah where the Israelites "grumbled" against Moses and the Lord.

In today's reading although the people have escaped from their captivity in Egypt, they are stranded in the desert and dying of thirst. They complain to Moses:

            Why did you ever make us leave Egypt?

            Was it just to have us die here of thirst

            with our children and our livestock?

Because of their thirst the people lost their faith in Moses and even in God. They wondered, "Is the Lord in our midst or not?"

In today's gospel account the Samaritan woman fails to see the Lord in her midst even when she comes face to faith with Him. In the first two Sundays in Lent the Church presents us with big, dramatic events in the life of Christ--the Temptation in the Desert and the Transfiguration. But today and next week we will encounter two ordinary people like ourselves. This week's story is about a woman going to draw water from a well. Next week's story will be about a blind beggar.

We all should be aware of the social background of today's gospel from St. John. The Samaritans were descendants of Jews who had intermarried with non-Jewish settlers hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. They were regarded by the Jews as traitors and idolaters because they had added some of the foreign beliefs and practices to their Judaism. In addition, it was rare, even scandalous, for a Rabbi to speak to a strange woman in public.

So we can understand the woman's response to Jesus when He asked her for a drink of water. "How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?" Our Lord replies that if she only understood who was facing her, she would be asking Him for living water. Why can't she believe? So many others when they encounter our Lord seem to instantly believe. Is it because He is a Jew? Is it because He is a man? Is it because He is not what she expects the Messiah to be like? Or maybe, she's like us and just doesn't expect that at this time and this place she can at last find Goodness and Happiness.

 Today's excerpt from St. Paul's letter to the Romans is his most famous statement about  faith.             .

            Since we have been justified by faith,

            we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,

            through whom we have gained access by faith

            to this grace in which we stand...

I won't try to add any more words to the millions of words that have been written about "justification by faith." I will only say that St. Paul as a result of his own conversion was sure that all of us, whether we know it or not, have been given the gift of faith by virtue of our Lord's great act of love on the Cross. Faith is not something that we get by reading books, or by praying, or by hearing some persuasive speaker. It is a gift that has been given by God. Indeed, it is only because we have faith that we are able to hope and love in the midst of all the suffering and sorrow in the world.

However, we can deny or lose this great gift of the Spirit of God and when we do, hope and love will disappear from our lives. We can say like the Israelites in the desert, "Is the Lord in our midst or not?"

We don't have to look far to find this attitude in our own time. Whenever some natural disaster occurs, there are always those who ask why God could have allowed it to happen. Some will even go so far as to blame God as if He were responsible. It's even more faith shattering when the disaster strikes close to home in the suffering or death of a loved one. 

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I know of a young man who ridiculed his mother's religious faith because of the suffering that her mother, his grandmother, had to endure at the end of her life. "Where was your God when Nana was suffering?"  The answer to his question was staring him in the face. His mother had taken care of her mother every day and stayed with her throughout her suffering. She was one of those rare individuals who absolutely refused to place her mother in a nursing home. The young man also must have known that his mother, a Catholic, had also spent countless hours consoling a Jewish friend who had lost a young child. Why couldn't the young man see the Lord in his midst in the faith of his own mother?

Just like our Lord she gave of herself for her mother, her friend, and for her son. As St. Paul said,

            But God proves his love for us,

            in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

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Reading 1. Exodus 17: 3-7

Reading II. Romans 5:1-2, 5-8

Gospel. John 4: 5-42 (the Samaritan woman).