Continuing the Journey of Faith, Fourth Tuesday of Lent, March 24, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent
Memorial of St. Oscar Romeo
March 24, 2020
Ezek 47:1-9.12, Ps 46, Jn 5:1-16

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

The following points were pondered at Mass: 

• “Do you want to be well?,” Jesus asks a man who has been crippled for 38 years. At first glance, it’s a strange question. It’s like asking a starving man if he’d like a sandwich, a man in prison if he’d like a pardon, a post-partum woman if she’d like to hold her newborn. The answer is totally obvious: of course the man would want to be made well! He was, after all, at the Pool of Bethesda to participate in a superstitious race with the blind, lame, crippled to be the first one into the pool when the waters were stirred, believing that that was the path to be restored to wellness. But Jesus asked the question at a deeper level, trying to solicit the man’s deep desires, so that the man’s will would be involved in the cure. The man didn’t respond the way we would have thought he would, with an emphatic, “Yes, of course!” Instead, he acknowledged that he needed help to be cured — he needed someone, he thought, to place him into the pool when the water became “alive.” Jesus had come to help and cure him with another type of living water, the living water enlivened by the Holy Spirit he had announced to the Samaritan woman earlier. Jesus, in curing him and us, always wants to engage our will and our freedom. That’s why he asks whether we want to be made well. The problem with this man was that he was embittered, complaining, defeated. His will had been crushed. In response to Jesus’ simple, straightforward question, he blurted out how crippled his spirit was. “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.” What should have been an immediate affirmative response had morphed into a “Woe am I” self-pitying violin solo.
• Today, around half-way into a very difficult Lent, Jesus asks us, “Do you want to be well?” He doesn’t want us to reply with apathy, with a broken down, “I’ve tried to live a great Lent but I’m failing in my resolutions and so I have lowered my expectations because I just don’t want to disappoint myself, you or others.” He doesn’t want us to utter, “The coronavirus has changed everything and so I’ve given up out of fear!” He wants us to respond, rather, with hunger, thirst, enthusiasm, “Yes, Jesus! I do want to be totally spiritually healed! Please help me!” He wants us to say, “Yes, Jesus, I trust in you!” Jesus’ words to this man are almost identical to what he said to the paralytic he healed in Capernaum, “Rise, take up your mat and walk,” because there is a great similarity between the miracles. In Capernaum, Jesus first forgave the paralyzed man’s sins. In Jerusalem, Jesus told the man, “Lord, you are well. Do not sin any more.” In each miracle, Jesus did not cure merely a physical paralysis but a spiritual one, and he does it in such a way that he wants us, in faith, to trust in his healing power and cooperate, however little, in the miracle. He wants us to participate in our own healing and set out more fully on the adventure of the Christian life and the journey of faith. Our spiritual healing of the animavirus of sin is even more important than a bodily healing from the coronavirus. But Jesus wants us to turn to him with faith for both — and to grow in faith in doing so. Today’s entrance antiphon shows us the invitation God wants us to seize: “All who are thirsty come to the waters, says the Lord. Though you have no money, come and drink with joy” (Is 55:1).
• This growth in faith is pointed to by the very powerful imagery of the first reading. Ezekiel sees a vision of water trickling from the eastern side of the Temple down toward the Arabah, the sandy 20 mile desert that separates Jerusalem from the Dead Sea. The Angel takes Ezekiel another 1000 cubits (about 500 yards since a cubit is the distance between the elbow and the top of the middle finger, about 18 inches for those of us who aren’t in the NBA) and the water is now ankle deep; another 500 yards and it’s knee deep; yet another 500 and it’s up to his waist; a final 500 and it had become a river over his head so that he could only swim across it. And along it’s path, it brought all types of life to the desert as it flowed into the Dead Sea — where no marine life can survive because it’s 20 times the salinity of the ocean — and raised it literally from the Dead, making it fresh and allowing all types of fish to live in it again. This is an image of the Christian life of the baptized. On the day of our baptism we receive a trickle of the Living Water flowing from the true Temple’s — Jesus’ — pierced Eastern side, the font of sacramental life for the Church. But we’re to journey more deeply with that living water. By the time we’re able to communicate with others and with God and pray, this living water should be up to our ankles. By the time of we’re ready to receive Jesus in Holy Communion, it should be up to our knees so that we can kneel in adoration. At the age of Confirmation, it should be up to our waist so that we, by the help of the Holy Spirit, can live by the Spirit and not by the concupiscence of the flesh. By the time we’re adults, we should be submerging ourselves in it and allowing that river of Living Water to direct us to wherever he wants us to bring vitality even in the midst of the deserts of life. The Living Water who is Jesus wants to raise from the dead whatever Dead Seas we bear inside, converting what is salty and bitter into something fresh and alive. God wants to say of us, “They shall be watered by the flow from the sanctuary,” the sanctuary of who Jesus is and the water flowing from his side. It behooves us, therefore, this Lent and every Lent to ask ourselves whether we are advancing in this Living Water, whether we’re allowing Jesus to raise within us whatever is dead. Jesus wants to cure us of our spiritual stagnation! But he wants us to want to be cured!
• The Lenten season is meant to be a pilgrimage, cubit by cubit, more and more deeply into Christ the living water. We begin on Ash Wednesday and seek to unite ourselves to Christ in his prayer, fasting and almsgiving. We advance to listening to him and seeing his glory at the Transfiguration. We ask him to give us this living water always, like the Samaritan Woman.  We could look at a thousand, possible Lenten angles, but the main point is what is our desire, do we hunger to be healed, are we translating that hunger into a journey with Christ the living water into the desert, cubit by cubit, so that he can give us life? Are we focused on these spiritual realities while at the same time confronting human realities?
• Today the Church lifts up for us an example of this constant growth in the Lord’s living water at the same time that we’re confronting very human crises: Saint Oscar Romero, the 40th anniversary of whose martyrdom the Church marks today. He was always known for his love for God and for the poor, but he was also pretty timid temperamentally and probably likewise in faith. When he became Archbishop, however, God asked more of him, particularly when people started assassinating his priests and his people. On March 23, 1980, he preached a homily asking the members of the armed forces not to carry out any order contrary to God’s law. “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression,” he said. He was killed the next day as he celebrated Mass in the chapel of Divine Providence Hospital, despite being warned that his life was in danger. He had already had bombs placed underneath his pulpit that failed to detonate. He rejected the offer of military bodyguards, saying, “I don’t want protection as long as my people are not given protection. With them, I want to run all the risks that my vocation demands of me.” Like Christ he prayed for his executioners in advance. In one conversation with a newspaper reporter, he said, “Can you tell them, if they succeed in killing me, that I pardon and bless those who do it? But I wish that they could realize that they are wasting their time. A bishop may die, but the Church of God, which is the people, will never die.” Like a good shepherd, with love for God and God’s flock, he courageous gave all his mind, heart, soul, strength and blood. And he’s praying for us to follow his example of courage during this time of the coronavirus. He wants each of us to turn to the Lord and receive his help to become more courageous, to become well spiritually, so that we can better care for those whom God has entrusted to our and the Church’s care.
• St. Oscar died in Mass because it’s the Mass that strengthens us to be martyrs. God gives us himself. The way we grow in the love of God with all we are and have and the love of neighbor with all we are and have is through the Mass. The Mass helps us to learn to “do this in memory of” him, giving our bodies, our blood, our sweat, our tears, our mind, heart, soul and strength in mercy for the good of others as Jesus has given all he had for us and our salvation. Today the same Jesus who spoke to the crippled man says to us,  “Do you want to be made well?,” awaiting our response. Here in the Eucharist, he wants to help us to respond with enthusiasm, “Yes, I do!,” and open ourselves up to the way by which, like with St. Oscar, he wants to raise from the dead whatever in us is lifeless, and guide us to grow in our receptivity to his mercy and our passing it on. Today we ask him for the grace today to advance 1000 cubits in faith in his mercy and allow him who is the Living Water to pour out from this altar a great river flowing into Manhattan leading us in the current to where he wants us to bring life and resurrection.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel
JN 5:1-16

There was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
Now there is in Jerusalem at the Sheep Gate
a pool called in Hebrew Bethesda, with five porticoes.
In these lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled.
One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years.
When Jesus saw him lying there
and knew that he had been ill for a long time, he said to him,
“Do you want to be well?”
The sick man answered him,
“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool
when the water is stirred up;
while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.”
Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.”
Immediately the man became well, took up his mat, and walked.

Now that day was a sabbath.
So the Jews said to the man who was cured,
“It is the sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.”
He answered them, “The man who made me well told me,
‘Take up your mat and walk.’“
They asked him,
“Who is the man who told you, ‘Take it up and walk’?”
The man who was healed did not know who it was,
for Jesus had slipped away, since there was a crowd there.
After this Jesus found him in the temple area and said to him,
“Look, you are well; do not sin any more,
so that nothing worse may happen to you.”
The man went and told the Jews
that Jesus was the one who had made him well.
Therefore, the Jews began to persecute Jesus
because he did this on a sabbath.