Year B / Lent / 5th Sunday
Readings: Jeremiah 31.31-34 / Psalm 51.3-4,12-13, 14-15 (R/v 12a) / Hebrews 5.7-9 / John 12.20-33
If you attend the Novena devotion the Redemptorists conduct on Saturdays, you would hear of letters thanking Mother Mary for interceding to God who granted the faithful’s petitions. Exams are passed. Health is restored. Marriages are saved. A baby is born. A job is secured. A life is turned around. These attest to God’s goodness in the histories of our lives. They also speak about a new chance at life.
"Another chance at life" is a theme in our responsorial psalm on this 5th Sunday of Lent. Another chance to make right what is wrong. A second chance to live in God’s ways. A new chance to be in friendship with God and one another. A chance not to ignore God again. We hear all these when the psalmist’s cries out for such a chance: “Create in me a clean heart O God and renew a right spirit within me.”
Tradition identifies the psalmist as King David. He is begging God to forgive his sins of adultery and of killing the husband of the woman he slept with to cover up his wrongdoing. Realizing that his sinfulness cuts him off from God, he humbles himself and reaches out for God’s mercy. His cry voices his desire for a cleansed heart, a renewed spirit, a second chance. He longs to be reconciled and to be in right relationship with God again that his sins damaged. And so he cries out, “Create in me a clean heart O God and renew a right spirit within me.”
The character Ian in Anne Tyler’s novel Saint Maybe also bears a terrible burden of guilt. Angry with his brother and sister-in-law, he accuses the wife of cheating on the husband. His unfounded allegation leads to their deaths, leaving behind their three children. “It’s my fault,” he confesses. Ian longs for a second chance to be set free from guilt. He hopes to earn his forgiveness by taking care for the three orphaned children. He cuts himself off from others, including himself, to do this. But after a few years of doing this work, of “atoning and atoning” for his sins, he still does not feel God’s forgiveness. So, he focuses even more on avoiding risks and mistakes so that he can do what he thinks are the right things to appease God. He is indeed “King Careful. Mr. Look-Both-Ways. Saint Maybe” that a child nicknames him.
What would Jesus do if he meets David and Ian? What would Jesus do when he meets us whose Lenten cries have also been to ask God to cleanse and renew us who have sinned?
Jesus tells us in today’s gospel story that he will draw all people to himself when he is lifted up on the Cross. This is how Jesus will set in motion God’s reconciliation with humankind. Where sin divides us from God, from one another and from ourselves, God’s love in Jesus mercifully bridges and compassionately unites us all in God’s life.
Our gospel story is a reminder that we cannot earn forgiveness like Ian thought he had to. Instead, it proclaims that God in Jesus, through Jesus and with Jesus will indeed cleanse and renew us. Why? Because it is in God’s very nature to love freely and to mercifully give us a second chance, and also a third, and a fourth, and so on for life. This is why God always forgives. And this is why Jesus through his prayers and supplications to a forgiving God, Paul reminds us in the second reading, is the perfect source for our salvation.
So the question we have to answer is not, “What would we do with a second chance?” It must be instead: “What will you and I do with God’s chance to start over again, and again, and again?”
Our gospel story begins with a request: some Greeks approach Philip and ask him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” Haven’t others also ask us to see Jesus, to point them to Jesus, to show them Jesus? Jesus’ mission was to show the world the face of God. This is also the same mission Jesus calls us to. Aren’t we who have experienced God’s chance to start over again and again the best witnesses of God’s loving face to others? Won’t our words and actions help them see, experience and know God?
How can we do this? By doing what Jesus did on the Cross: reveal God’s glory to the world. Like a grain of wheat that must fall to the ground and die so that it produces food for many, so did Jesus’ death brought forth eternal life. This moment also revealed the glory of God’s saving love. What was “within” the Jesus was “outed” for us: the love of God.
I once read about how the assistants at the L’Arche Community in Toronto show the love of God: by caring for the dignity and well-being of the mentally-challenged members. These assistants serve from their insides and die to the worldly way of being paid very much in words or money. Their insides, their “within,” comes out in gestures of faithful patience, selfless love, generous care. They would love to hear a “thank you” or “love you” from the mentally challenged, but they don’t. Yet, these assistants continue to care for them.
If we can care like these assistants by dying to ourselves for others, then we will reveal to them what is within us: the grace of God’s chance to start over again. When they observe how God’s chances help us to live better and transformed lives, they can begin to know that this truth is also God’s promise for them.
This weekend Pope Francis visits Naples. He will be meeting and eating with prisoners, including those who are gay and transgendered. This act is life-giving; it assures the prisoners that they are God’s own, and that they do have another chance at life. More importantly, Francis’ act should challenge us who can be smug because we live the Christian life to ask ourselves how merciful we really are towards those we push away because they are in our eyes always criminal, degenerate, disgusting.
Ian in Saint Maybe eventually becomes a sign to those around him that second chances are real and possible. By opening himself to the possibilities of risk and fulfillment, of relationship and marriage, of healing and new life, Ian testifies to what Jesus models for us on the Cross: it is when we make ourselves vulnerable to live, love and hope again that we can always die and rise again and again in God, and finally in our death and resurrection into eternal life with God. This is how we can let God’s gift of another chance cleanse us and renew us again and again in our everyday lives.
What then should you and I do in these final days of Lent to give God a chance to help us start over again?
(inspired in part by the writings of Joseph S Pagano)
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: from the internet (sport-kid.net)
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