Homily for Lent V Year B Sunday 29 March 2009
Today’s Gospel describes a turning point in John’s account of the ministry of Jesus as the momentum of events gathers pace that will bring him to his death. The important thing here is mentioned right at the start of the passage we have just heard: some Greeks came to find out who Jesus was. Now we can see from the Greek word used by the evangelist that these Greeks are not Greek-speaking Jews, they are not members of the nation of Israel, they are Gentiles. All through his ministry, as described in all the gospels, Our Lord is shown as addressing himself to the Jewish people- as St Paul reminds us in Romans “They are Israelites and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises” and so they have to come first, the message of salvation must be heard by them first, that is their right. Occasionally we see a Gentile trying to get to Jesus for healing, to gatecrash, as it were, the wonderful events that are happening wherever Jesus goes. You remember when Jesus went up into the region of Tyre and Sidon- modern Lebanon- and there was that woman who came and begged him to heal her little daughter- Mark tells us “now the woman was a Greek, a Syro-phoenician by birth”. Our Lord begins by saying to her “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”. She wins him over, doesn’t she, by her clever reply:”Yes, lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs”. (Mk 7) This story is making the point that in the time of Jesus’s earthly ministry the Jews must come first- the food of his word is meant for them. If they don’t want it, well, then we’ll see… Of course there is no suggestion that somehow the rest of the world wasn’t going to have their turn, only that the Jewish people must have the first chance. If we were in any doubt about this, Mark follows this story with the Feeding of the Five Thousand- which shows the Jewish crowd fed- it says “and they ate and were satisfied” and then adds that “they took up the broken pieces left over”- the crumbs under the table, in other words- “seven baskets full”. In John’s account (Jn 6) there is even more: the disciples gather up all the crumbs, because Jesus says nothing must be lost, and they fill twelve baskets! The message is: after the Jews have had their fill, there is still an abundance to satisfy the rest of the world. But the point I want to make is, that Jesus is concentrating primarily on the Chosen People in his ministry.
All that is going to change of course, as we know- the Jews reject Our Lord, a great sorrow to him every time he reflects on it and every time their unwillingness to accept him becomes more apparent. The future lies with the Gentiles. And now, as today’s Gospel shows us, this sea change is beginning. A group of Gentiles come, via Philip, to find Jesus. Philip has a Greek name, and comes from Bethsaida, which was a predominantly Gentile area, and was almost certainly a Greek speaker, so it is perhaps inevitable that they should use him as a go-between. Their request is so simple and direct; “we should like to see Jesus”. Their arrival is seen by Jesus as a sign of such importance, that he says “Now the hour has come!” He recognises that things are moving into place, the reluctance of the Jews to believe in him is being replaced by the eagerness of the Gentile world to accept him. Many times in this Gospel Our Lord has spoken about his time, his hour- he has repeatedly told the disciples that the time is not ripe, that the hour is not yet. You remember how at the wedding at Cana, he turned to Our Lady and said “My hour has not yet come” and when he first went to Jerusalem with his disciples, at a time when John tells us that “even his brothers did not believe in him” (Jn 7 v) he said almost as an excuse for nothing happening “My time has not yet come”. The evangelist says a bit later that they tried to arrest him on that occasion “but no one laid hands on him because his hour had not yet come”. (7 xxx) But we are much further on in the story by now, and Jesus has just made his final entry into the city, with all the palms and the hosannas, now the time is right, now things will happen, and happen fast. “Now the hour has come” says Jesus, who knows what path he is now treading, where events will now quickly lead him. He is truly human as well as truly divine, and so we should not be surprised that he has a purely human reaction to the prospect of the death that awaits him, as the writer to the Hebrews tells us in our second reading, praying “aloud and in silent tears” and here he cries out “Now my soul is troubled”. But how can he ask to avoid it- “it was for this very reason that I have come to this hour!”
And so what is the “hour” that we have heard so much about? It is of course the death of Jesus, the crucifixion, that supreme act of self-sacrifice, the “lifting up” that I spoke about last week- “and when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men to myself” Jesus speaks here of his death being like the seed that dies in the ground, the seed that will then bear fruit and “yield a rich harvest”, the dying that will in fact be life-giving, and life-giving for all the peoples of the earth, not just for one. But the crucifixion, if it is the hour of Jesus, is also the hour, the critical moment, for each one of us too- as Jesus says, “Now sentence is being passed on the world”- now we come into court, now is our moment of judgement, of waiting for the sentence of God on us. Our Lord is indeed drawing everyone to him, offering us his open arms of love, whoever we are, wherever we’ve come from, whatever we’ve done- but we must respond! It is on our response that we shall be judged, when “the sentence is being passed on this world”. What was our response to our Lord, to his message? Did we accept him, or was it all too much trouble to take him seriously?
At every Mass we step outside time and come to the Last Supper and to Calvary, to re-enact that sacrifice of love. Now the hour has come, and here we are, like those Greeks of two thousand years ago. We turn to our priest with the same eager longing, the same humble request- “We should like to see Jesus” and at the words of consecration that he will utter, we will, and in that seeing, in that gazing upon his Body, broken for us, may we renew our commitment to follow him. Dear Jesus, give us the crumbs under your table, and when you are lifted up, draw us all to yourself; as “sentence is being passed on this world” “forgive (our) iniquity and never call (our) sin to mind”. Amen.
Sunday 29 March 2009
homily for Lent IV 2009
Homily for Lent IV 22 March 2009
Today’s Gospel starts with the phrase “The Son of Man must be lifted up”. The evangelist is saying that when Our Lord will be lifted up, or better because Our Lord will be lifted up, then we will have eternal life- somehow the lifting up will be the moment, the event that will bring the possibility of eternal life, that is, of our reconciliation with God. This is the first of three occasions in John’s Gospel where this phrase “lifted up” is used. Later on, when we find Jesus being cross-questioned by a crowd of Jews, in chapter 8 of the Gospel, and they ask him “Who are you?” (8;25), he tells them “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know” making it clear that somehow his full identity will only be made known in this lifting up, that this act of being lifted up, of allowing himself to be lifted up, will be Jesus being his most authentic- only then will we see who Jesus really is, what his life and mission have been really about- what in other words, Jesus is for…. And thirdly, we find this phrase again in chapter 12, when the events of Holy Week are beginning to gather momentum and the crowd is flocking round him because they have all heard he has just raised Lazarus from the dead and they are hanging on his words in a mood of curiosity that may go sour at any moment. Jesus is having his moment of purely human fear and anxiety at his fast approaching death. “Now is my soul troubled” he says, as he prepares to submit himself to all the injustice that is coming to him- “Now is the judgement of this world.” (12:31-32) He goes on “And I when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all men to myself”. What does “lifted up” mean then? Well, Our Lord himself explains it, because the next thing we read (v33) is “He said this to show by what death he was to die”. It is – as I am sure you have understood all along- all about the cross, Our Lord’s death on the cross.
Now the next phrase we need to look at is this bit about Moses- “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert”. What is that about? Well, it refers to a story told in the book of Numbers chapter 21. The Children of Israel are still wandering round and round the Sinai peninsula at this point, still being led by Moses and gradually being turned by his influence from the “mixed multitude” of slaves who left Egypt into a group of people with their own clear identity, the Chosen People of God. They got more and more fed up of course as time went on, with all this wandering- it must have been a bit like a holiday that has gone wrong- marvellous when you start out, but now the novelty has worn off and you get hot and tired and grumpy! You know what I mean I’m sure- that moment when you’re sick of all this foreign food and all you want is a nice cup of tea. The Book of Numbers says “the people became impatient on the way” and they said to Moses “What have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this wilderness? For there is no food and water and we loathe this worthless food!” I’ve been on tours like that! They were eaten up, in a sense, with bitterness and anger, and the next thing that happens is that a lot of them get bitten by “fiery serpents” and die- the poison of these deeply destructive emotions- resentment and rage- kills. The people realise, a bit late it’s true, how wrong they have been to harbour all these negative self-centred and self-pitying thoughts, they have seen that they will bring about our death if we let them take us over and let their venom course through our veins unchecked. “Pray to the Lord” they beg Moses “that he take away the serpents from us”. And what happens next is that God tells Moses to make a serpent out of bronze and set it on a pole “and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live”. And after that if anyone was bitten by one of these snakes, he just had to fix his gaze on the bronze serpent and he would be cured.
What lessons for us lie in this ancient story! The destructive power of bitterness, that warps and withers the personality, is indeed a killer, a snake spreading its poison in our lives. Along with it go those other snakes in the same family, self-pity and ill humour. We all know people who are always complaining, always angry about something or another, always in a bad mood- how boring they are, how we try to avoid them, but what a prison they have created for themselves by getting stuck in such modes of thought, what a death sentence they have passed on themselves when they decide that this is me, I rather like being this self-important never satisfied Mr Grumpy.- or Mrs Grumpy indeed, or Sister Grumpy, or Father Grumpy. What is the only cure for these dangerous, indeed fatal, diseases, for this snakebite of rancour? How can we be inoculated against the fiery serpents, because we need to be- we may not be in the wilderness any more but there are plenty of fiery serpents lying in wait for us right here in Lewisham! They can jump out when we least expect it, in the most unlikely places, at the most unlooked for moments, for “There is no place where Temptation does not have access” as St Francis de Sales once said.
The answer of course, is the Cross- just as in the wilderness anyone looking at the bronze serpent was cured of his snakebite, so looking at the Cross we are brought up face to face with the love of God for us and the price Our Lord paid to reconcile the human race afresh to its loving Creator. The Cross shows us – as Our Lord had predicted in the Gospel- who Jesus really was, and what God wanted to show us through his earthly life and death. It is what St Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians that we heard at Mass last week: “ Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles….Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”. Face to face with this total sacrifice, the final proof of God’s radical love for us and the lengths to which he will go for us and with us, our soul searching must begin in earnest and like the baby Hercules, we will want to reach out and strangle the serpents ourselves before they do any more damage to us. Here in the crucifix we see selfless love and willing surrender, and when we hold the Cross up as a mirror to our own lives, may it cause in us a reflection of God’s generosity and goodness. Lord Jesus, we make the same prayer this morning as the Children of Israel did all those centuries ago- “take away the serpents from us”, free us from the poison of rancour, and help us to look upon your Cross, and you lifted up on it, to let ourselves be drawn into your life. Amen.
Today’s Gospel starts with the phrase “The Son of Man must be lifted up”. The evangelist is saying that when Our Lord will be lifted up, or better because Our Lord will be lifted up, then we will have eternal life- somehow the lifting up will be the moment, the event that will bring the possibility of eternal life, that is, of our reconciliation with God. This is the first of three occasions in John’s Gospel where this phrase “lifted up” is used. Later on, when we find Jesus being cross-questioned by a crowd of Jews, in chapter 8 of the Gospel, and they ask him “Who are you?” (8;25), he tells them “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know” making it clear that somehow his full identity will only be made known in this lifting up, that this act of being lifted up, of allowing himself to be lifted up, will be Jesus being his most authentic- only then will we see who Jesus really is, what his life and mission have been really about- what in other words, Jesus is for…. And thirdly, we find this phrase again in chapter 12, when the events of Holy Week are beginning to gather momentum and the crowd is flocking round him because they have all heard he has just raised Lazarus from the dead and they are hanging on his words in a mood of curiosity that may go sour at any moment. Jesus is having his moment of purely human fear and anxiety at his fast approaching death. “Now is my soul troubled” he says, as he prepares to submit himself to all the injustice that is coming to him- “Now is the judgement of this world.” (12:31-32) He goes on “And I when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all men to myself”. What does “lifted up” mean then? Well, Our Lord himself explains it, because the next thing we read (v33) is “He said this to show by what death he was to die”. It is – as I am sure you have understood all along- all about the cross, Our Lord’s death on the cross.
Now the next phrase we need to look at is this bit about Moses- “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert”. What is that about? Well, it refers to a story told in the book of Numbers chapter 21. The Children of Israel are still wandering round and round the Sinai peninsula at this point, still being led by Moses and gradually being turned by his influence from the “mixed multitude” of slaves who left Egypt into a group of people with their own clear identity, the Chosen People of God. They got more and more fed up of course as time went on, with all this wandering- it must have been a bit like a holiday that has gone wrong- marvellous when you start out, but now the novelty has worn off and you get hot and tired and grumpy! You know what I mean I’m sure- that moment when you’re sick of all this foreign food and all you want is a nice cup of tea. The Book of Numbers says “the people became impatient on the way” and they said to Moses “What have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this wilderness? For there is no food and water and we loathe this worthless food!” I’ve been on tours like that! They were eaten up, in a sense, with bitterness and anger, and the next thing that happens is that a lot of them get bitten by “fiery serpents” and die- the poison of these deeply destructive emotions- resentment and rage- kills. The people realise, a bit late it’s true, how wrong they have been to harbour all these negative self-centred and self-pitying thoughts, they have seen that they will bring about our death if we let them take us over and let their venom course through our veins unchecked. “Pray to the Lord” they beg Moses “that he take away the serpents from us”. And what happens next is that God tells Moses to make a serpent out of bronze and set it on a pole “and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live”. And after that if anyone was bitten by one of these snakes, he just had to fix his gaze on the bronze serpent and he would be cured.
What lessons for us lie in this ancient story! The destructive power of bitterness, that warps and withers the personality, is indeed a killer, a snake spreading its poison in our lives. Along with it go those other snakes in the same family, self-pity and ill humour. We all know people who are always complaining, always angry about something or another, always in a bad mood- how boring they are, how we try to avoid them, but what a prison they have created for themselves by getting stuck in such modes of thought, what a death sentence they have passed on themselves when they decide that this is me, I rather like being this self-important never satisfied Mr Grumpy.- or Mrs Grumpy indeed, or Sister Grumpy, or Father Grumpy. What is the only cure for these dangerous, indeed fatal, diseases, for this snakebite of rancour? How can we be inoculated against the fiery serpents, because we need to be- we may not be in the wilderness any more but there are plenty of fiery serpents lying in wait for us right here in Lewisham! They can jump out when we least expect it, in the most unlikely places, at the most unlooked for moments, for “There is no place where Temptation does not have access” as St Francis de Sales once said.
The answer of course, is the Cross- just as in the wilderness anyone looking at the bronze serpent was cured of his snakebite, so looking at the Cross we are brought up face to face with the love of God for us and the price Our Lord paid to reconcile the human race afresh to its loving Creator. The Cross shows us – as Our Lord had predicted in the Gospel- who Jesus really was, and what God wanted to show us through his earthly life and death. It is what St Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians that we heard at Mass last week: “ Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles….Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”. Face to face with this total sacrifice, the final proof of God’s radical love for us and the lengths to which he will go for us and with us, our soul searching must begin in earnest and like the baby Hercules, we will want to reach out and strangle the serpents ourselves before they do any more damage to us. Here in the crucifix we see selfless love and willing surrender, and when we hold the Cross up as a mirror to our own lives, may it cause in us a reflection of God’s generosity and goodness. Lord Jesus, we make the same prayer this morning as the Children of Israel did all those centuries ago- “take away the serpents from us”, free us from the poison of rancour, and help us to look upon your Cross, and you lifted up on it, to let ourselves be drawn into your life. Amen.
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