Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent (B), Vigil
March 13, 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 Fourth Sunday of Lent, which the Church calls Laetare Sunday, a title taken from the first word of the entrance antiphon for Mass: “Laetare, Ierusalem”: “Rejoice, Jerusalem, and all who love her. Be joyful, all who were in mourning: exult and be satisfied at her consoling breast.” Those words of consolation, originally given to the exiled Jews in Babylon, are just a small sign of the far greater liberation and joy that Jesus was going to bring into the world, a liberation from the exile and alienation caused by sin, and a freedom from the captivity to which sin leads, death. That’s a message that’s supposed to make not just Jerusalem rejoice, but New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Rome, Paris and every city.
- That joy is because of the unfathomable love of God that would stop at nothing to redeem us. The Church has us ponder that love in the Gospel this Sunday, when St. John tells us, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life.” The Evangelist adds, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,” to render to us strict justice on account of our sins, “but so that the world might be saved through him.” While the human race was in a far worse situation than the Jews in Babylon, God himself sent someone greater than the King of Persia to set us free. He sent his own Son. When God the Father had a choice to allow us to die in eternal exile or allow his Son to take our place on death row and be brutally mocked and crucified, he loved us in some sense even more than his Son. He chose to save our life by allowing his Son to give his. This indescribable love is an incredible cause for joy! That love of God that would pull out all the stops in order to save us is the root of all Christian joy.
- But it’s important for us not to hear this message in a softened and sentimentalized way. It’s great that so many plaster “John 3:16” on football stadiums around the country proclaiming our joy that God loves the world and us so much, but at the same time, sometimes many don’t find a contradiction when during those same football games, some players are stomping with their cleats on their adversaries and cursing in huddles as fans are getting plastered in the stands watching scantily clad cheerleaders stoke their concupiscence like Herod Antipas and his drunken courtiers watched his step-daughter dance. For us to enter into the joy that comes from Christ’s love, we need to grasp what it cost, and what response it demands.
- Jesus describes that cost in his conversation with Nicodemus in the Gospel passage this Sunday. For those of you who have watched the crowd-funded television series The Chosen, which I recommend and a very moving visual meditation on the Gospels, you know that much is made of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, who not only is a member of the Sanhedrin, but also a searcher for the truth. Jesus challenges him a lot to open his mind to the truth that he came into the world to bring. Jesus challenges Nicodemus first about the need for baptism. Then he challenges him in Biblical language about what he would do on the Cross to make Baptism effect what it signified. Jesus says in this Sunday’s passage: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him might have eternal life.” That was an allusion first to the work of the ancient serpent, who got Adam and Eve in the Garden to distrust God, sin, and essentially choose death over life. But then it pointed to what God had allowed to happen to the Jews in the desert who were complaining about what they had to eat, distrusting anew in the One who had just saved them from Pharaoh. As we see in the Book of Numbers, God allowed saraph serpents to slither among them and bite them with poisonous venom. The antidote God prescribed to save them was to have Moses make a bronze serpent and mount it on a staff, and those who looked on that serpent — a reminder of the sins that had infected them with a fatal bodily and spiritual venom — they would be saved. Jesus said that he on the Cross would become like that elevated bronze serpent. He would suck the poison of sin out of our wounds and take it with him to Calvary. When we looked at him on the Cross, we would see, first, just what your sins and mine had caused; second, the fact that we can’t save ourselves from our sins by our own efforts; and, third, the great love of God who would take on those sins and the death to which they inexorably lead in order to provide us the saving antitoxin.
- But the type of glance we need to give to Jesus lifted up on the Cross must not remain merely visual. To be saved we need to look with the eyes of faith, a faith that has to translate in a way of life. That’s what St. John expresses immediately after the consoling words about the depth of God’s love. “Whoever believes” in Jesus, he tells us, “will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned.” He forcefully reminds us that just like those in Jerusalem prior to the exile refused to listen to the prophets, so we can refuse to listen to Jesus, to look upon him with the eyes of grateful faith, and to receive his free gift of salvation. “This is the verdict,” St. John states, “that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light. … But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.” To look on Jesus lifted up on the Cross with the eyes of faith means to enter into the logic of the Cross. It means to heed Jesus’ words we hear every Lent, to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross each day and follow him, leaving the darkness of sin behind and entering with him into the light. Like St. John, we must behold the one we have pierced and see the saving, transformative blood and water flowing from his side. Like St. Paul, we need to look at Christ on the Cross in a way that leads us to become one with his saving love. “I have been crucified with Christ,” St. Paul said to the Galatians, “and it is no longer even I who live but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me!” That’s why St. Paul was able to glory and boast in nothing “except the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world is crucified to me and I to the world.” That’s why when Jews found the Cross a scandal (that the Messiah would be murdered by the very occupying forces from whose clutches they anticipated he would liberate them) and the Greeks a folly (that someone would be so dumb as to be publicly tortured and ignominiously executed), St. Paul was able to find in the Cross his power and glory. He found in the Cross the source of the healing we most need!
- What Jesus explained to Nicodemus in the Gospel, and fulfilled on Golgotha, takes on special meaning at Mass. It’s at Mass that we behold Jesus lifted up not as a bronze serpent but as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. It’s at Mass that we encounter the awesome truth that God so loved the world so much that not only did he give his Son in Palestine 2,000 years ago, but shows that love even more by giving us his Son every day on the altar and making his Son’s forgiveness available to us every day in the Sacrament of Penance. As we prepare for Mass, let us get read to look on Christ, lifted up on the Cross, lifted up in the host, and say, with Saint John and all the members of the Church, “We have come to know and to believe in the love God us for us!” (1 John 4:10). We have, indeed, come to trust in him and in saving mercy! We have come to believe in and live in his light. Laetare, Jerusalem! Indeed, Rejoice, Jerusalem! Rejoice, o world! Rejoice, listeners to Conversations with Consequences! God’s merciful love is real and God loves us so much that he never ceases to share that gift with us!
The Gospel on which this homily was based was:
Gospel JN 3:14-21
Jesus said to Nicodemus:
“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish
but might have eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,
but whoever does not believe has already been condemned,
because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
And this is the verdict,
that the light came into the world,
but people preferred darkness to light,
because their works were evil.
For everyone who does wicked things hates the light
and does not come toward the light,
so that his works might not be exposed.
But whoever lives the truth comes to the light,
so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.
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