Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), Vigil
March 20, 2021
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 in the Gospel this Sunday, the Fifth Sunday of Lent, which occurs after 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 might 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, to find Jesus, we need to be prepared to seek him in humility on the Cross. And to see him enduringly, we must be prepared to follow him. He 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, pick up our Cross and die to ourselves on it, in order to follow him to real fruitful, unending life. This second point 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 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 Sunday’s Gospel is to ourselves who wish to see Jesus and love him in this world and forever in the next. In order to do that we need to travel this exodus from saving our life to losing it, from looking at ourselves in 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. We’re called to die to 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 also 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 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 we need to be ready not only to assist them in coming to Jesus but as a community to help them find him. 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’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 far more severe: “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. He wants to change that. 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 hear him in the way we talk, see him in the way we act, touch him in the way we care, taste him by tasting and seeing his goodness, smell him by the fragrance of true holiness of life.
- 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. Jesus is 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 find him and are transformed by him to be sent forth as grains of wheat to be planted throughout the world, so that, transformed by true Christian love, they may become his face, his hands, his feet, his heart in the world, drawing everyone onto his path, onto the exodus that leads to life eternal. This is, as Pope Benedict tells us, the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.
The Gospel on which this homily was based was:
Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover Feast
came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee,
and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.”
Philip went and told Andrew;
then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
Jesus answered them,
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,
it remains just a grain of wheat;
but if it dies, it produces much fruit.
Whoever loves his life loses it,
and whoever hates his life in this world
will preserve it for eternal life.
Whoever serves me must follow me,
and where I am, there also will my servant be.
The Father will honor whoever serves me.
“I am troubled now. Yet what should I say?
‘Father, save me from this hour’?
But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.
Father, glorify your name.”
Then a voice came from heaven,
“I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”
The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder;
but others said, “An angel has spoken to him.”
Jesus answered and said,
“This voice did not come for my sake but for yours.
Now is the time of judgment on this world;
now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
And when I am lifted up from the earth,
I will draw everyone to myself.”
He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.
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