Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, March 16, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, B, Vigil
March 16, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us on the Fifth Sunday of Lent, on which in the Gospel some Greeks approach the Apostle Philip saying, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went to Andrew and Andrew went to tell Jesus. Jesus’ response to the Greeks’ desire to see him is not just surprising but outright shocking. He announced that they would see him glorified, but glorified not in the way everyone would have expected as an exalted civil leader, not like he was during the Transfiguration or as he will be at the end of time. No, Jesus said they would see him glorified when he would be lifted up from the earth on the Cross, when he would fall like a grain of wheat to the ground and die before being raised as the new Tree of Life. To see Jesus, like the Greeks, and to find him, we need to be prepared to behold him in humility on the Cross. And to see him enduringly, we must be prepared to follow him along the way of the Cross. Jesus tells us, “Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am there will my servant also be.” To find him we must follow him along the path of the grain of wheat, the path of losing our life so as to gain it. We must deny ourselves rather than affirm ourselves, die to ourselves on the Cross each day, and thereby follow him to real fruitful, unending life. This second point — about our exaltation — may seem equally shocking to us, just as shocking as Jesus’ glorification on the Cross.
• Pope Benedict commented on Jesus’ words in Sunday’s Gospel back in 2006 in his first encyclical (Deus Caritas Est). He called Jesus’ path — which is supposed to become our own path in faith — the “essence of love and indeed of human life itself.” Listen to the deep words of our former Holy Father: “Love is… a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: ‘Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it,’ as Jesus says throughout the Gospels. In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfillment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.”
• The new and eternal covenant that Jesus himself establishes, the new Passover on which Jesus wants to lead us, is, Pope Benedict says, an “exodus from the inward looking self to liberation through self-giving, authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.” We will only see God, we will only find our life, when we leave self-centeredness behind, when we stop trying to “preserve our life” in the rear-view mirror and rather learn to give our life as a grain of wheat, dying to ourselves in order to bear great fruit for God and others. This is the only path, Pope Benedict says, to the discovery of God and true self-discovery.
• So the first application of this Sunday’s Gospel is to ourselves who wish to see Jesus and love him in this world and forever in the next. We need to make an exodus from saving our life to losing it, from looking at ourselves through spiritual navel gazing to looking toward God and others and giving ourselves in loving sacrifice. This needs to occur in our prayer, in which we “lose our lives” and our time with God in order to anticipate eternity. The exodus also needs to occur in our almsgiving, as we forsake our obsession with our own interests and begin to see Jesus in others, especially in those who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, ill, in prison or otherwise in need. The exodus needs to occur in our moral life in general, as we pass over from saying, “My will be done” to “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” And all parts of that exodus are made possible through our fasting, when we learn to say no to the inward looking self so that we may make the journey out of ourselves toward God and others. That’s the first great lesson we learn from our conversation with Jesus this Sunday.
• The second application is about bringing others to Jesus. So many today, like the Greeks in the Gospel, still want to see Jesus. They look to Christians, to those in the Church, like the Greeks looked to Philip, to try to bring them to Jesus. And each of us needs to be ready not only to assist others in coming to Jesus but as a community, collectively, to help them find him. The Church must become great in bringing others to God, in facilitating the encounter with him. That means ultimately that we need to teach others how to pray. I’ve been very moved as the Catholic chaplain at Columbia to be approached this year by several students after various tragedies, like the death of a friend, humbly and honestly telling me that, while they were grateful for what the professionals at psychological and counseling services told them, they knew that they needed more. They knew that they needed God. The problem was that they didn’t know how to speak to him. So they came to me to ask me to pray for I told them I’d be happy to pray on their behalf, but I’d prefer to pray with them and help them to learn how to have a conversation with God themselves, a dialogue that could fill their whole life, in good times and in bad. Every student with whom I met looked at me as if I were offering them a billion dollars in gold. A couple of students fought back tears as they accepted my offer. Some of the students were baptized Catholics. Most weren’t. But they all know that they needed God. They all wanted, like the Greeks, to see him. We must all become catalysts for the many in their situation who have never been taught the most important of human activities, how to pray. And we’re all called to be able to help them learn how to come into the consequential conversation with God we call prayer.
• The truth is that there are many who are longing for Jesus but they don’t find him where they should: they don’t find him in the lives of Catholics they know, or in the Catholic Churches they visit. They don’t find his truth and word, they don’t find his infectious love, they don’t find his joy, they don’t find his light, they don’t find his life.There was a custom in many of the ancient high pulpits in Churches and Cathedrals to put the words there, “Volumus Iesum videre!,” “We want to see Jesus!” It was a reminder to priests to preach Christ and him crucified, him exalted on the Cross, him glorified. There’s the famous saying of Mahatma Gandhi, the non-violent liberator of India. He was fascinated by Jesus, whom he said taught like no one else. He would quote the words of Christ, especially from the Sermon on the Mount, very often. Once a missionary, E. Stanley Jones, asked him, “Mr. Gandhi, though you quote the words of Christ often, why is it that you appear so adamantly to reject becoming his follower?” Gandhi replied, “Oh, I don’t reject Christ! I love Christ! It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike Christ. If Christians would really live according to the teaching of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.” These are stunning words. Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the phrase “God is dead and if he weren’t we’d have to kill him,” and whose thoughts were one of the seeds of Nazism, said something even more severe than Gandhi: “I may have been able to believe in a Redeemer, if I had ever met someone redeemed!” The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) pondered this point when it said, “Believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion.” The point is that people are looking to see Jesus and expecting to find him in those who call themselves his followers, but often they search in vain. Jesus wants to change that. Jesus who wants us to contemplate him and discover who we are reflected in his eyes, Jesus who calls us to follow him along the path of the grain of wheat, along the way of the glory of the Crucifixion, wants people to be able to see him in the way we act, hear him in the way we speak, touch him in the way we care, taste him by tasting and seeing his goodness in our Christian communities, and smell him by the fragrance of our prayers that rise to him like incense and through the odor of true sanctity.
• The greatest way of all we find Jesus in this world is in his real presence in the Holy Eucharist, and that’s what we’re preparing for this Sunday. As Pope Francis wrote in his 2022 Apostolic Letter on the Sacred Liturgy, Desiderio Desideravi, if people had “somehow arrived in Jerusalem after Pentecost and had felt the desire not only to have information about Jesus of Nazareth but rather the desire still to be able to meet him, [they] would have had no other possibility … of a true encounter with him” than coming to the celebration of the Mass with the early Christian community. That’s where we still see Jesus today. Hence Pope Francis says, “For this reason the Church has always protected as its most precious treasure the command of the Lord, ‘Do this in memory of me.’” It’s at Mass that we encounter Jesus as the grain of wheat who dies, but from that lifeless grain that fell along the way of the Cross has come forth the great multiplication of the Bread of Life that will endure until the end of time. It’s in the Eucharist that Jesus continues to be glorified in self-giving love. It’s in the Eucharist that those wishing to see Jesus not only find him but are transformed by him to be sent forth as grains of wheat to be planted fruitfully throughout the world. Our Eucharistic encounter is the means by which, we transformed by Christ’s loving gaze, are able become his face, his hands, his feet, his heart in the world, drawing everyone who still wishes to see Jesus onto his path, onto the exodus that leads to life eternal. This is, indeed, the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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