In the opening lines of today’s Gospel, Jesus gives a curious response to what seems a legitimate request from possible converts to the Faith: “We would like to see Jesus.” He seems to ignore their request, speaking, instead, about His impending Passion, which would indicate to us that, when we meet Jesus, it will be on His terms, not ours.
Yet, like God the Father’s words in today’s First Reading, there is comfort, strength and renewal extended. In His little discourse here, Jesus is comforting His listeners as the dying patient, knowing that death is near, comforts the survivors, because the patient can see beyond the suffering to life beyond this life.
The Lord teaches us here that we must all face our own Gethsemane with its fearful and challenging proposition, so that to enter new life, and, eventually, eternal life, we must face a personal judgment, as this Lenten season provides, in which the “ruler of this world” (Satan) must be driven out of our life, and, by the Grace of God, shriven from sin, we become drawn to Christ in holiness.
So, Jesus is not ignoring those who ask to see Him, He is telling them — and, therefore, us — that seeing Him provides a beginning, but is not enough; He wants us to follow Him. This is the basis for the New Covenant of which God the Father speaks to Jeremiah. The Old Covenant, begun with Abraham and carved in stone for Moses, will find its fulfillment in this New Covenant revealed in love, not carved in stone, but now written upon hearts. Eventually, in following Christ, this Covenant of Love is to be internalized as relationship.
We must, then, assure that our hearts are not as cold and hard as stone, nor that our minds have conceived for ourselves laws of our own making which govern our relationship with God as well as our moral choices in this life, thus negating God’s plan for covenant relationship with us.
How will this New Covenant be enacted for us? Listen again, to these important words that God speaks to Jeremiah: “I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, for I will forgive their evildoing.”
When you think of how high a price must be paid for the redemption of our evildoing — the Passion and Death of Our Lord — you get the first inkling of just how profoundly our sin offends God. Yet God does not wallow in the offense we give Him, He does what it takes to redeem us, knowing that some will respond while others continue to reject Him. This is why Jesus says of the voice from heaven in today’s Gospel, “This voice did not come for my sake, but for yours.”
He says further that “now is the time of judgment…” so that these closing weeks of Lent must be for us a time of
+ self-judgment
+ confession of sin - and -
+ purification for our souls.
Just as in the final days of Advent we rejoiced as we were led from Nazareth to Bethlehem, in these final days of Lent, we must summon the courage to follow Him through Gethsemane to Golgotha.
The Author of the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of Christ Jesus being perfected through suffering. One would have thought that Christ was perfect to begin with, but we must remember that in the Incarnation, the perfect, divine Son of God took on a human body, and human consciousness, subject to all the imperfections of being human (with the exception of sin) with real - and not imaginary - suffering, being among those many human imperfections.
It was His prayer, however, so profound that it brought Him to tears, that purified His suffering, transforming it into obedience, the source of human perfection. Obedience changes willfulness into a desire to belong to God, to seek and to live His Holy Will, granting the ultimate in freedom within the heart, which allows a person to echo the twin proclamations of holy Obedience so central to our faith:
+ that of Mary at Nazareth: “Be it done unto me according to thy word. >>>
+ and of her Son at Gethsemane: “Not my will, but Thine be done.”
Flanked by Our Lord and our Blessed Mother, we can: face the anxieties of our own “Nazareths” when the future seems unclear, knowing, however, that God is there… and face the terror of our own Gethsemane when it seems the world as we know it is coming to an end, and all we can do is cling to the rock of our faith and sweat blood, but aware that Good Friday is not the end of the story.
So, as we look forward to the end of Lent and to the rest of our lives on earth, it is important to keep the Covenant, and God’s fidelity to it in your mind…to keep the Law of God and the ultimate freedom it provides in your heart, so that when we read the Lord’s Passion next Sunday, or face our own Passion and suffering whenever it comes, we might hear again the Father’s comforting and strengthening words: “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”