Spring is finally here.
How many are following the men and women’s college basketball championships? Unfortunately, my favorite teams didn’t make it this year. But I still will watch the championship games on April 4/5.
This Fifth Sunday of Lent, in the Gospel, Jesus is in Jerusalem for the Passover meal which celebrates the exodus: the deliverance of the Hebrews from their oppressors.
Now Gentiles, non-Jews, were seeking out Jesus. For the author, to see Jesus is to believe in him. Yes, the hour has come. Only by his dying and rising will we have eternal life.
That is the point of the parable about the grain of wheat. Only if Jesus is lifted up on a cross, buried in a tomb, to burst forth gloriously on Easter in a new spiritual embodiment, will the risen Christ draw all men and women into a new heavenly reality.
Yes, Jesus is indeed our salvation.
The word “salvation” answers a fundamental question: What is the ultimate purpose of my life? Whether powerful or powerless, rich or poor, brilliant or simple, born here or elsewhere, the purpose of life for all is to be in relationship with God: to seek and find friendship with God forever.
The Catholic answer to the question, why are we here? acknowledges the brevity and fragility of human life.
But there is a tendency within ourselves to sometimes choose wrong. The Catholic tradition calls this “original sin.”
Yet human beings cry out for healing, redemption, salvation. Some look for answers in things, in other persons, in the many “isms” throughout the centuries.
The Catholic tradition looks to a power beyond ourselves, to a God who is not indifferent to our brokenness. An all-good, compassionate and forgiving God who created us and loves us unconditionally.
Yes, God became flesh in Jesus and is alive by the power of the Spirit and is in our midst today—alive within us by virtue of baptism; alive in the Scriptures and alive in the signs of bread and wine upon the altar. We possess in our fragile selves the gift of God’s triune life, God’s grace.
Yes, we are born to be in that awesome relationship with God. Yet we must struggle against the dark forces within ourselves that threaten to derail us on our journey toward our heavenly dwelling place.
Salvation ultimately means God abiding in us and we in God.
Our faith proclaims that God’s life leaps out of death; beyond the agony of our Good Fridays is the ecstasy of Easter.
And so, I pray that hearing the word of God today, we will
recharge ourselves to seek God first
to live a God-centered, other-centered, life, to become the best version of ourselves.
