Monastery garden

This reflection was offered for the Fifth Sunday of Lent as part of the Portsmouth Institute’s Lenten Series in 2021.

Lent is almost over. Only two weeks left. Since Lent is our time to reconnect with the truth of Jesus, His mission and message, we have only two weeks left to succeed in this task. We are challenged to do this every year because we change. And we need to relearn what Jesus can do in the changing circumstances of our lives. Today is the First Sunday of the that part of Lent which the Church calls Passiontide, and in the Gospel story Jesus is approaching Jerusalem, which he will enter next Sunday. And his apprehension and foreboding grows as he comes closer to his destiny. Perhaps ours should as well.

God is trying to tell us something in these readings, much as Jeremiah was trying to tell his people, God’s chosen people, something important. Jeremiah was used to failure. He lived in a time of political and moral crisis, yet very few listened to him. Some tried to discredit him, others to kill him. At one point, King Jehoiakim destroyed the scroll of Jeremiah’s prophecy which was being read to him. After each section was read the King sliced it off with a knife and contemptuously threw it in the fire. Jeremiah wrote: I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the LORD. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.

What a hopeful message that was, and yet no one was buying it. 2,500 years later it still appears that, relatively speaking, almost no one is buying it. In March 2012 and again in June 2016 there were rallies of 20,000 atheists on the Mall in Washington DC. There should have been another rally is 2020, but the pandemic thankfully prevented that. They called it a Rally for Reason. The prophet of contemporary atheism, Richard Dawkins, was one of many who addressed this crowd celebrating their unbelief. Unbelief was not enough for him, however. He called on the crowd not only to challenge religious people but to "ridicule and show contempt" for their doctrines and sacraments, including the Eucharist. The President of American Atheists gave a thundering call for "zero tolerance" for anyone who disagrees with or insults atheism, and he urged the crowd to "Stand your ground!" We know where that leads.

Only God knows what is written on their hearts, but it certainly does not appear to be God’s law. What times we live in. Never mind ISIS or terrorists from over there. It’s bad enough here, as we’ve learned in Portland and in Washington on January 6. What sort of things have we seen in recent times? Parents claiming to be home-schooling their 13 children under-fed them, kept them in squalor and chained them to their beds. A mentally disturbed former student invaded his old high school and killed 17 students and teachers, wounding 17 more. For no apparent reason, a mild mannered 64-year old man opened fire on a music concert in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and injuring 851. A man opened fire in Pittsburgh in an anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue, killing 11 people and injuring six others. At an El Paso Walmart, a gunman shot and killed 23 people and injured 23 others. The police seem to shoot more often than necessary, and now angry civilians shoot at the police. On the news every day some parent kills his or her children, or some child kills his or her parents. During this pandemic, mass shootings are up by 35% over 2019, murders are up 16% and so are domestic violence calls to 911. Everyone’s finger seems to be on some trigger. As militant atheism and agnosticism, rampant consumerism, pessimism, division and anger dig their roots into our country, we are all affected. All of us suffer from the moral decline around us as we all become polarized and return intemperate language for intemperate language. No one seems to listen anymore; there is only posturing.

Ab. Michael Brunner (screenshot from online Lenten Reflection)

God only knows what is written on our hearts, but we can certainly pray along with Jesus Christ: I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? 'Father, save me from this hour?' But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Why did God put us here? What is our purpose in our time, this time of growing polarization, mutual hostility and violence. What could our purpose be other than to be a force for truth and reconciliation, to be martyrs in the fundamental meaning of that word of witnesses to the power of truth and love? That must be our purpose, to work for the unity Jesus prayed for, that all may be one. But we the Church, are not all that unified ourselves. There is polarization, hostility, lack of understanding and respect right in the middle of us. At least one cardinal publicly pulls people away from Pope Francis. It is déjà vu all over again with birth control and health insurance. More than half of Catholics support or use contraception and perceive no attack on their religious freedom, while almost half take the opposite position. We have Latin Mass communities and English Mass communities; Catholic schoolers, public schoolers, home schoolers. Often these groups don’t get along. An alien from another world who watched both Fox News and CNN would think they were reporting on different planets. God help us all as we try to make sense of what is happening in Washington. Can a house divided against itself stand?

After the creation story, the first half of the book of Genesis describes the effect of sin. It is similar to a small crack in a windshield that mile by mile, day by day, spreads out in all directions until it has spread through the entire glass and utterly destroys it. If only we had solutions for the dilemmas of today. We may well feel just like Jeremiah, speaking the truth but not listened to, and like him being attacked for speaking it. When Jeremiah’s land was conquered, and the cynical king was killed and the temple destroyed, according to tradition, the Babylonians spared Jeremiah for speaking the truth, and he went into exile in Egypt where he was martyred for again speaking the truth to power. That was the answer God gave his Chosen People. 600 years later, Jesus prayed to be spared from his hour, but acceded to God’s will. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered. The Gospel tells us that God’s voice spoke from heaven and Jesus tells us this voice “did not come for my sake but for yours.” Now is the time of judgment on this world; God’s time is not our time, which is too close for us to see the future and we are too nearsighted to learn from the past. We have only our now, the present time to work with, and God’s judgment is a fearful thing for any nation or man, sinner or saint. When Jesus says now the ruler of this world will be driven out it is clear that this is a very long “now,” as we measure time.

We ourselves can only act in the present moment, to choose where we stand, either fearfully behind a fortress wall, or alongside an unlocked door that says: Welcome, Enter…in every language, with our arms spread wide like Jesus’ on the cross. “And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.” As members of the mystical Body of Christ, as His presence on the earth in our time, now, it is our job is to draw everyone we meet and touch to Jesus Christ. Pope Francis asks us to evangelize… spread the Gospel, the Good News, by attraction, by our joy as we stand alongside that open door. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more. The gospel today begins with a request put to the apostle Philip, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” They were not asking to see a painting of him or a statue. They wanted to see him in the flesh. They speak for the world. The world does realize it is in a mess and it does crave something to save it, to make things right. We really do have the answer, Jesus Christ, and we must find the way to make the world of today notice, listen and see. It is a tough job for us, but fortunately a simple one.

Despite the negative signs of our time, we must be optimists and faith that it will all turn out well because God can take our efforts, in fact, He can even take evil and make good come out of it. Forrest Church, the deceased pastor of a Church on the upper east side of NYC, had a simple way of explaining this way of living. “Want what you have. Do what you can. Be who you are.” What do we have? We have a vocation, a unique personhood, grace, the truth, Jesus Christ and the Church, all of which we should want and cherish. What can we do? We can do wonders with what we have, and for all whose lives touch ours. We can resist evil with our bodies sometimes, with our voices more often, and with our prayer always. And Who are we? We are nothing less than sons and daughters of God; we are other Christs; we are receivers and carriers of the Holy Spirit to broadcast the truly good news of salvation and Jesus’ consoling and calming presence. Our presence as other Christs makes real in our time that which St. Luke tells us Jesus’ promised to his Apostles and to us: Do not be afraid any longer, little flock of mine, for your Father is pleased to give you the kingdom.