Accomplishing the Will and Work of the Father, Fourth Wednesday of Lent, March 17, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Lent
Feast of St. Patrick, Patron of the Archdiocese of New York
March 17, 2021
Is 49:8-15, Ps 145, Jn 5:17-30

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• From Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent through Tuesday of Holy Week, we will ponder the Gospel of St. John at morning Mass. These passages focus on Jesus’ conversations with the “Jews,” mainly his critics among the Scribes and Pharisees, and contain some of Jesus’ most complex and deepest monologues. It’s important as we enter into them that we remember two central coordinates that should guide our interpretation just as they have been guiding our Lenten preparation for Easter.
  • First, the whole point of Lent is to help us enter into Communion with God the Father. Jesus called us to pray, fast and give alms differently than all the rest: he taught us to pray not for others to see but in intimacy with the Father in our inner room, whether we’re all alone inside a house or in the midst of a crowd; he told us to fast not so that others may notice but so that we can come to share God’s hunger to care for all his sons and daughters; he instructed us to give alms not to win others’ praise but as an extension of the Father’s providential care for us. The entire point of Lent is for us to realize what both the younger and the older sons in the Parable of the Prodigal Son failed to grasp: the enormous treasure of the love of the Father who gives us everything he has and to live in communion with that love. We will see that in today’s readings very clearly.
  • Second, during this second of three phases of Lent, from the third Monday through the Fourth Friday of Lent, we have readings that are meant specifically to help the Elect to prepare for Baptism and for the Baptized to renew their baptismal promises, not just in words, but in the way they go about every aspect of life, so that they might live it with the “newness of life” to which Baptism introduces and calls us. In Baptism, we become God the Father’s beloved sons and daughters. The devil we reject in Baptism is the one who tries to tempt us, like he tempted Jesus, “If you really are the Son of God…” to distort our relationship with the Father through sin and presumption. The path of defeating the devil is to follow Jesus, to “listen to him,” as God the Father says to us on the Second Sunday of Lent in the Transfiguration.  Today Jesus will be describing for us his work of bringing us to life through Baptism and the Sacraments so that we may have life to the full.
• These considerations help us understand what Jesus is teaching us in today’s Gospel. He is teaching us about the Father, about himself as the image of the Father, and about how we’re supposed to live made in God’s image and likeness, as sons in the Son. Jesus is the icon of the Father who came to reveal to us the Father’s love. But that love was shocking to the various older brothers among the religious class of scribes and Pharisees who wanted to make God in the image of their own rigid ideas. When Jesus healed the man crippled for 38 years in the Pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath, they thought it was a huge sin rather than a manifestation of God’s goodness. They believed that God who rested from creation on the Sabbath would take a day off from loving his sons and daughters on the Sabbath — just as the Scribes and the Pharisees, who had made the Sabbath an idol, were doing. That was the launching pad for Jesus to begin to describe, to their easily-scandalized shock and homicidal horror, how he reveals the Father. In today’s passage he gives us three ways he images the Father, which show us three ways God wants to transform us and to help us to imitate him.
• The first is that he is the icon of the Father’s work. Jesus says, “My Father is at work until now and so I am at work.” Just as the Father never ceases to do good, so Jesus doesn’t take a day off from charity. Jesus was responding to their criticism that he worked on the Sabbath, but he was reminding them he was only doing what the Father does on the Sabbath, namely love. “Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for what he does, the Son will do also. For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything that he himself does, and he will show him greater works than these, so that you may be amazed.” At the end of today’s first reading, God tells us through the Prophet Isaiah, “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you.” A mother wasn’t going to allow her breastfeeding child to go without nourishment at any time, but even if a mom were capable of that — and in the abortion culture of today, we know that, sadly, sometimes women can be tempted to be without tenderness for the children growing within them — God the Father wouldn’t be. Jesus came to give witness to this. That’s why Jesus healed so much on the Sabbath, to overcome the conviction of those who had perverted the Jewish religion to pretend as if God didn’t even want us doing works of charity, works of mercy, on the Sabbath. The first thing we need to do is allow the Father to do his work of sanctification in us so that we, in turn, can, yoked to his Son, imitate that work of charity.
• The second thing Jesus revealed has to do with how Jesus, together with the Father, gives us life. Jesus indicates that just as the Father gives life, so the Son likewise gives life even to those who are dead. “For just as the Father raises the dead and gives life, so also does the Son give life to whomever he wishes.” He went on to describe that this life is a relationship with God the source of all life through hearing his words with faith. “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and … has passed from death to life. Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For just as the Father has life in himself, so also he gave to the Son the possession of life in himself.” Jesus imitates, he participates, in the Father’s paternal life-giving love, becoming, as St. Melitus of Sardis once taught, a father to us is giving us supernatural life through the Sacraments. Jesus says that he does this work of helping us come to life by our hearing and obeying what we hear Jesus say. When he raises Lazarus from the dead, Jesus indicates, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in me, even if he died, will live and no one who lives and believes in me will ever die.” Real life comes through a relationship with him who is the source of all life. Sharing in the life of the Son allows us to enter into the life of the Father. Jesus’ work on earth was so that we “might have life and have it to the full,” and on earth and still in heaven, Jesus never ceases to work so that we might experience that life now and forever. He wants us to receive that gift of life and be so transformed by it that we bring others to receive that same gift.
• The third work, and closely associated with that of giving life, Jesus says, is the work of judgment. Often when we hear the word judgment, most of us can begin to dread it as the time when all our misdeeds will catch up with us. But judgment also has a very positive meaning, too, pointing toward salvation. It is the time when the Father will say to those who have responded to his offer of life and lived and worked together with him, heard his Son’s words and believed in the Father who sent the Son, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” Jesus in today’s passage tells us, “Nor does the Father judge anyone, but he has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father.” Jesus’ judgment, however, is not arbitrary or fundamentally his own, but as he says later, “I cannot do anything on my own; I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me.” He judges in union with the Father, according to the Father’s criteria, which makes his judgments just. And because Jesus came into the world “not to condemn  the world but so that the world might be saved through him” (Jn 3:17), Jesus, in union with the Father, wants to do everything he can — and has done everything necessary — to help us to follow him along the path of life, the path to his eternal right side, where the judgment will be a canonization instead of a condemnation. He tells us that if we hear (obey) his word and believe in the Father who sent him, we will have “eternal life and not come to condemnation.” That faithful obedience is the path to the “good deeds” of love that will lead us to the “resurrection of life” he describes rather than the “resurrection of condemnation” for those who have refused that love.
• Someone who related to the Lord this way, who allowed Jesus to do the Father’s work in him, who received his life, who was judged a good and faithful servant and who sought to be an instrument of the Son’s saving mission was Saint Patrick, the patron saint of the Archdiocese of New York. Even though St. Patrick’s father was a deacon and his grandfather a married priest, St. Patrick wrote in his Confession that at the age of 16 he really didn’t know God. He was kidnapped from his native Scotland and brought into slavery for six years in Ireland, but it was there that God revealed himself to him. Like a loving mother with a nursing infant, God did not forget him. The God whom we praised in the Psalm for being “near to all who call upon him, to all who call upon him in truth” showed himself near. Patrick wrote that he began to pray while shepherding his master’s flocks, sometimes spending whole nights in prayer. One night in a dream, when he was 22, he heard a voice telling him to be ready for a brave effort to secure his freedom. And he trusted in the dream. In the morning, he escaped and hustled 200 miles to a boat that he saw in the dream was about to depart. After adventures and hardship during which he was able to bring many of the ship’s crew to conversion, he arrived home. But after several days of joyous reunion with the family he loved very much, he began to be moved in prayer and in dreams to think of all those back in Ireland who had never known the Gospel, who had never experienced how merciful and gracious he was. Against the wishes of his beloved family, he decided to use his newly found freedom to dedicate himself to returning to the land of his captors, to preach to them the truth that would set them free. The Lord used his slavery to teach him the language he would need, to help him develop the necessary zeal, to return to lead the Irish to salvation. He had no illusions, however, about how difficult the task was that lay in front of him. He went to France to prepare for the priesthood. In France, he prayed, fasted and readied himself for 20 years. At the age of 43, having been consecrated bishop so that he could found churches and ordain priests, he set off with a few apostolic collaborators. Over the course of the next 30 years, he labored tenaciously for the conversion of the nation. As one of the great “Lenten” saints, he famously fasted for 40 days and 40 nights on what is now called Croagh Patrick in prayerful bodily supplication that those entrusted to him would receive the Gospel with faith. Village by village, chieftain by chieftain, he planted the seed of the Gospel. Though his life was in constant peril due to the hatred of the druids, he soldiered on, and through prayer, mortification, disputation, and miracles, his life of faith bore enormous fruit. Twelve years after his arrival, he was able to found the Church of Armagh, Ireland’s primatial see. By the time of his death in 461, the whole nation was Christian.
• One of the most important parts of his work was to reveal the Trinity to them and to help them not just know “about” the one God in three persons, but to enter into relationship. Jesus’ work was to reveal the Father, complete his work, impart his life, echo his words. The Holy Spirit’s work was to remind us of everything Jesus himself had taught and to help us, in Jesus, to cry out Abba, Father. St. Patrick not only had a deep relationship with the Holy Trinity but sought to reveal him to the Irish. The legend says that he used a shamrock, which had been sacred to the Druids, to explain God to them: just as the shamrock has three leaves on each stem, so in the one God there are three divine persons. His most famous prayer is his “breastplate” or “lorica,” words he wrote on a piece of clothing and wore under his clothes above his heart. It was what he used to pray every morning as his morning offering, consecrating the day to God, which is a prayer I’d encourage everyone to learn and to pray each day. It begins, “I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through a belief in the threeness, through confession of the oneness of the Creator of creation.… I arise today through God’s strength to pilot me, God’s might to uphold me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s eye to look before me,  God’s ear to hear me,  God’s word to speak for me, God’s hand to guard me, God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me, God’s hosts to save me.”
• The most famous line of that lorica is his prayer, “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me. Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.” It is Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit that brings us into the heart of the Trinity. And that’s the work of the Father that Christ wants to bring to fulfillment here at Mass. It’s here that he gives us his own imperishable life inside. It’s here that he prepares us for the communion that after the judgment will last forever. It’s here that he nourishes us like a mother her infant. It’s here that his grace and mercy reach their zenith. It’s here that he seeks to transform us, like he did St. Patrick, so that we may say with him at the end of today’s Gospel, “I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me,” and that will is for us, like Jesus, to become icons of the Father’s work, paternity, and just, merciful and saving judgment.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel
JN 5:17-30

Jesus answered the Jews:
“My Father is at work until now, so I am at work.”
For this reason they tried all the more to kill him,
because he not only broke the sabbath
but he also called God his own father, making himself equal to God.

Jesus answered and said to them,
“Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own,
but only what he sees the Father doing;
for what he does, the Son will do also.
For the Father loves the Son
and shows him everything that he himself does,
and he will show him greater works than these,
so that you may be amazed.
For just as the Father raises the dead and gives life,
so also does the Son give life to whomever he wishes.
Nor does the Father judge anyone,
but he has given all judgment to the Son,
so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father.
Whoever does not honor the Son
does not honor the Father who sent him.
Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever hears my word
and believes in the one who sent me
has eternal life and will not come to condemnation,
but has passed from death to life.
Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here
when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God,
and those who hear will live.
For just as the Father has life in himself,
so also he gave to the Son the possession of life in himself.
And he gave him power to exercise judgment,
because he is the Son of Man.
Do not be amazed at this,
because the hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs
will hear his voice and will come out,
those who have done good deeds
to the resurrection of life,
but those who have done wicked deeds
to the resurrection of condemnation.

“I cannot do anything on my own;
I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just,
because I do not seek my own will
but the will of the one who sent me.”

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