How God Hears Our Voice in Distress, Fifth Friday of Lent, April 3, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent
April 3, 2020
Jer 20:10-13, Ps 18, Jn 10:31-42

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In the Psalm today, we enter into the experience of the Jews as a source of our Christian hope. We prayed, “In my distress I called upon the Lord, and he heard my voice,” and that was something that occurred over and again in Jewish history. They turned to God as their “strength, rock, fortress, deliverer, shield, stronghold and horn of salvation” and over and again he came to their rescue. This is not only a key to help us to understand these readings, but also a prism by which to understand how our faith is meant to help us approach the Covid-19 pandemic differently than the rest. In the readings today we see precisely how God responds to our distress. On one level, it’s great consoling. On another, it’s superficially not the response we want! But it’s the response we need.
• Today we see in Jeremiah’s words and suffering a typological reference to what would occur to Jesus, something we can already see in the Gospel today. Jeremiah begins by saying he’s surrounded by plots against him, even the betrayals of those whom he thought were his friends: ” I hear the whisperings of many: ‘Terror on every side! Denounce! let us denounce him!’ All those who were my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine. ‘Perhaps he will be trapped; then we can prevail, and take our vengeance on him.’” It would have been very easy in those circumstances for Jeremiah simply to flee in order to save his life, for him to give up on the mission God had entrusted to him. It might have been tempting for him to strike his persecutors before they had the chance to strike him. Instead, he entrusted himself to the Lord, saying to him, “To you I have entrusted my cause!” He knew that God was just and wouldn’t let evil win. He knew that God would right the wrongs. He knew that God would ensure that the evildoers wouldn’t triumph but stumble. And so he entrusted himself to the Lord whom he called his “champion.”  Jeremiah said that he was waiting to “witness the vengeance” that the Lord would take on him.
• That “vengeance” would be fulfilled in Jesus, and it would be done in a way that Jeremiah would not have been able to foresee. Jesus, like Jeremiah, could have done so many things to escape from harm or to annihilate his persecutors in anticipation of their coming after him. Instead, he totally entrusted himself to his Father in order to witness his vengeance, the vengeance that would totally restore justice to the disorder caused by sin. That vengeance was mercy. As Jesus’ persecutors were hammering him to a Cross he cried out, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Jesus took upon himself all of the justice owed to us because of our sins and paid the price. We witness God’s “vengeance,” God’s justice, united to his merciful love every time we look at the Crucifix. But Jesus wanted an even greater vengeance than what most people ponder on Good Friday. He wanted us to share in his holy retaliation by receiving his mercy and passing it on, drawing good out of the evil we have done and suffered, and helping others to become similar co-redeemers. We can see in today’s Gospel two particular ways he wants us to participate in the “vengeance” he came into the world to bring.
• We see in the Gospel today the hostility of many of the Scribes and Pharisees to Jesus. They pick up stones in the Temple area to stone Jesus. Later they try to arrest him so that they can try him and have him executed. Jesus, St. John tells us, “escaped from their power,” not because he was running away out of fear, but because his hour had not yet come, the hour that would soon arrive, with a fixed date so that everyone could be clear he was leading us on a new passover and instituting a new and eternal covenant because of their liturgical connections to the old. Jesus confronted his persecutors, not in the hope of winning an argument — he was the winning argument! — but in the hope of leading them, even one, to conversion.
• “I have shown you many good works from my Father,” Jesus said, “For which of these are you trying to stone me?” We know that Jesus’ critics were constantly asking questions about his authority. A week ago Thursday, Jesus mentioned five for them: John the Baptist, his works, Sacred Scripture, Moses and his Father. On Monday this week, he boiled them all down to the witness of his Father, who was at work in all four other signs. Today he boils them all down again to his works, through which the Father gives his witness. His critics replied that they were not stoning him for any of the miracles he worked, but for “blasphemy,” for “making yourself God.” That’s a charge we shouldn’t pass by too quickly with historical hindsight. It was a very serious charge. As we’ve been hearing in the Gospel readings over the past two weeks, Jesus has multiply indicated that he is divine, saying things like before Abraham was, He is, and that the Father and he are one. For a Jew who worshipped the one true Lord, who was instructed by God himself not to have any other gods but Him, Jesus’ describing himself as the Son of the Father, his saying that the Father and He are consubstantial, his forgiving sins, which only God can do, would seem to them a gross violation of the first Commandment. What Jesus was proposing was a type of divine love that went way beyond externally keeping bilateral Covenant agreements, that God would enter our nitty gritty and liberate us from within in a way that to others might seem like a defeat culminating in public execution but from God’s perspective would culminate in the greatest victory ever imaginable. They didn’t care about how many works Jesus had done. They were not prepared to accept him even as the Messiah, not to mention the Son of God, and therefore they rejected the works as coming from below not above and stoned him first with their hardened hearts and steely speech before they would raise rocks to hurl at him.
• Jesus’ response to their accusation of blasphemy today is instructive. He first uses a rabbinical argument. He cites Psalm 82:6, which says about the judges of the people, “You are gods, sons of the Most High” because they are supposed to rule with God’s wisdom and justice. If that’s the way they refer to magistrates, then it is not blasphemous to refer to oneself as gods, Jesus was saying with classical rabbinical logic. We were all made in God’s image and likeness and God, in some way, wants us to reflect his own divinity in our humanity. To any Jew without a hardened heart, that ought to have been enough to recognize that one couldn’t ipso facto declare Jesus blasphemous for stating his divine filiation: “If it calls them gods to whom the word of God came, and Scripture cannot be set aside, can you say that the one whom the Father has consecrated and sent into the world blasphemes because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?”
• The second argument Jesus utilized concerned his works: “If I do not perform my Father’s works, do not believe me; but if I perform them, even if you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may realize and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” Jesus was admitting that they might have problems with his speech flowing from the narrow windows with which they were looking at God’s light throughout the centuries, but he was challenging them to consider the works he was doing. The miracles he was accomplishing couldn’t have been done by mere human power or by a magician’s sleight of hand. They needed to be done by a supernatural agency, either diabolical or divine. And when one examined the works themselves, especially the exorcisms, did it make any sense that they were done with serpentine power? At a spiritual level, it would, in fact, basically be blasphemous to call the works of God blasphemous, limiting God’s own power and accusing God of being diabolical.
• Jesus’ two arguments lead us to see how he wants us to share in his holy vengeance through our sense of divine filiation and through our works. First, about our divine filiation through Baptism, do we recognize that God has said to us, differently than Jesus but even more powerfully than to ancient Jewish judges,  “You are gods, sons of the Most High?” Do we remember that dignity? Do we choose and act in accordance with that dignity? Secondly, does our divine filiation show itself in our works? Jesus said during the Sermon on the Mount that our light — the light he ignites in baptism — should so shine before others that, seeing our deeds, they will glorify our heavenly Father. Could we say to others, “If you do not believe me [that Jesus is the true Son of God, that the Church he founded is the path to salvation, that her teaching about any particular defined matter is true, etc.], believe at least the works that I do?” Do are works show our faith? Do they announce the Good News? Do they radiate God’s love? Do they manifest the joy, the peace, the mercy, the self-mastery that flows from a genuine communion with God?” The whole preparatory period of Lent is meant to help remind us of our dignity and restore us to that dignity. We repent of all those times we haven’t lived as God’s beloved sons and daughters and return home where he vests us anew with signet rings, sandals and garments and throws a celebration for our return (Lk 15). And we are instructed by Jesus to believe in the Gospel, not just with our minds and hearts, but in all our actions.
• The greatest way to enter into the Lord’s vengeance is here at Mass. I rejoice today on the 28th anniversary of my definitive awareness of my priestly vocation, which is geared toward the celebration of the Sacraments. Jesus’ greatest works of all through his Mystical Body and Bride the Church are the Sacraments, and this is the great sacrament, the consummation of the union between Christ and his Bride. This is where we become one with what Jesus accomplished on Calvary, this is where we unite with his triumphal resurrection. This is where we receive within us that same Jesus who carried out that work of holy revenge on Satan, on sin, on death — including death by Covid-19 — and we ask him to help us to help others, in seeing our works and the beautiful of our identity as sons and daughters of God, come to the source of that same “vengeful love.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel
JN 10:31-42

The Jews picked up rocks to stone Jesus.
Jesus answered them,
“I have shown you many good works from my Father.
For which of these are you trying to stone me?”
The Jews answered him,
“We are not stoning you for a good work but for blasphemy.
You, a man, are making yourself God.”
Jesus answered them,
“Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, ‘You are gods”‘?
If it calls them gods to whom the word of God came,
and Scripture cannot be set aside,
can you say that the one
whom the Father has consecrated and sent into the world
blasphemes because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?
If I do not perform my Father’s works, do not believe me;
but if I perform them, even if you do not believe me,
believe the works, so that you may realize and understand
that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”
Then they tried again to arrest him;
but he escaped from their power.
He went back across the Jordan
to the place where John first baptized, and there he remained.
Many came to him and said,
“John performed no sign,
but everything John said about this man was true.”
And many there began to believe in him.