The Essence of Love and Human Life, Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), March 17, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year B
March 17, 2024
Jer 31:31-34, Ps 51, Heb 5:7-9, Jn 12:20-33

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• In many of the majestic pulpits in European Churches, they would often inscribe on the inside part that only the preacher could see certain phrases from the Bible to remind him about what he was mounting that pulpit to try to do. One of the most common, and probably my favorite, comes from today’s Gospel: “Domne, volumus Iesum videre,” “Sir, we wish to see Jesus!” People come to Mass ultimately to meet Jesus, to hear his words, to see him from different and new angles, to get to know him. And the preacher’s job is to help the faithful see him more clearly, to perceive his burning love for them, to discern more precisely what he’s asking of them.
• “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” So the Greeks in today’s Gospel said to the apostle St. Philip. Perhaps they had witnessed Jesus expel the moneychangers and animals from the Courtyard of the Gentiles in the Temple, as we focused on two weeks ago. Perhaps they had heard his reputation for miracles or for speaking with amazing and astonishing authority and wanted to hear him for themselves. Whatever the reason, they had come to see Jesus, probably not just to have a “been there, done that” experience with a religious celebrity, but really to get to know him.
• This desire to see Jesus hasn’t waned in the 2,000 years since. In fact, this desire is far older than 2,000 years. The psalms are full of those seeking the face of God, longing to come into face-to-face communion with him. Psalm 27 proclaims, in words that Pope Benedict once said sum up Catholic religious life in particular, “Your face, O Lord, I seek.” Little did those who were praying throughout Old Testament times to behold God’s visage know that God would eventually take on a human face similar to theirs! Still today, just as the ancient Israelites longed for God, just as the Greeks came to Philip searching for Jesus, many come to us and other members of the Church probing for God, hunting for love, foraging for meaning, and we need to be able, like Philip and Andrew, to bring them to the Lord. That’s what the new evangelization is all about, trying to help catalyze the encounter between God himself and the deepest desires he has placed in every heart, so that people, in seeing God, may recognize that God has always had them as the apple of his eye.
• 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 might have expected as an exalted civil leader, not like he was during the Transfiguration or 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. It’s then that Jesus, in fulfillment of Daniel’s, Isaiah’s, Jeremiah’s and Ezekiel’s prophecies that eventually the light would be given to all nations, would draw all people to himself. To see that light, to behold Jesus who is the Light of the World, they would have to recognize him as a grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, landing cold on the ground and being covered with dirt, but then raised as the new Tree of Life. If we’re seeking Jesus, this is where we must look for him and find him. Jesus says in today’s Gospel: “Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am there will my servant also be.” To find Jesus, we have no alternative than to follow him along the path of the grain of wheat, the path of losing our life so as to gain it, of denying ourselves rather than affirming ourselves, picking up our Cross and dying to ourselves on it. This second point about where and how we must find Jesus is perhaps just as shocking as Jesus’ glorification not on a throne but on the Cross. To understand either reality, however, we must grasp that and how both are motivated by divine love.
• Pope Benedict commented this reality of divine love in today’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 premises he gives to that extraordinary conclusion: “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 Jeremiah prophesies in the first reading and that Jesus himself established, the new Passover on which Jesus as the new Moses wants to lead each of us, is 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” and 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 path, Pope Benedict says, to the discovery of God and true self-discovery.
• So the first application of today’s Gospel is to ourselves who wish to see Jesus and love him in this world and forever. We must travel this exodus from saving our life to losing it, from the inward-looking self to the freedom of giving ourselves in loving sacrifice for God and others.
  • This needs to occur in our prayer, in which we “lose our life” in communion with God in order to “preserve it.” This is the way we come to see Jesus intimately with the eyes of the soul. Very often our prayer can be more about us than God. We can focus so much on our petitions that we can forget about praising and thanking God. Unlike Samuel who said, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,” we often say by our posture, “Listen, Lord, for I’ve got the floor.” We can come to the Lord with so many of our problems and occupy all our time with them that we can fail to lift up our hearts to God who is and has the solution. The first way to see Jesus is by living the exodus out of ourselves to him and others in prayer.
  • The exodus also needs to occur in our generosity. 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. When we sacrifice out of love for them, Jesus tells us in St. Matthew’s Gospel, we sacrifice for him. The more we give of ourselves, the more we gain ourselves. We can only keep what we give away. We’ll only bear fruit that will last forever when we follow Jesus down the path of the grain of wheat in charity.
  • The exodus also needs to occur in our moral life in general. The moral life is the Passover, from saying, “My will be done” to “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Our will wants to save itself, to preserve itself, to assert itself. We need to discipline it through obedience to God. We need to put to death life according to the flesh in order to live according to the Holy Spirit. That’s what Jesus did, as we see in the second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. He was perfected through his obedience to the will of God the Father and he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. Likewise, we will become perfected — and become an instrument of salvation in the lives of those we care about and so many others we may not even know — only through our obedience to God’s will, by morally dying to ourselves so that God may live. In some cases, as in Jesus’ life, as in the lives of the prophets who pointed to him and the apostles who announced him, this moral path may lead to our being lifted up on the Cross, to being martyred out of obedience to God. In order to remain faithful then, we must travel down the path of fidelity and self-denial out of love for and affirmation of Jesus each day. And if we remain faithful in these daily little exoduses, then we will be strengthened to remain faithful in the supreme moments and save our life forever.
• That’s the application of today’s Gospel to our discipleship, to our own personal following of Jesus. But there’s always an application as well to our aposolate, to our being fishers of men, to our carrying out the new evangelization and bringing others to the Lord.
• So many today, like the Greeks in the Gospel, still want to see Jesus. They look 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 we have a duty to help them find the face of Jesus when they come. Let’s see a few ways we need to help people find Jesus.
• First, we have to help them find Jesus by the life we lead. There are many who are longing for Jesus, but they don’t find him where in the Catholics they know. There’s the famous saying of Mahatma Gandhi. He was always 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.” By our fully Christian life, we are called to reveal, not conceal, Christ’s face for whom they seek.
• Second, we need to reveal Christ by the way we approach him as he speaks to us in Sacred Scripture. People expect, for example, that when they come to Mass in Catholic churches or chapels, they’re going to find people who believe in what Jesus taught, that man doesn’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. They expect that they’re going to have people who know that Jesus has the words of eternal life, who love word of God, not do not just hear it, but know and live it. They expect they’ll find ministers and people who are on fire, who long to see Jesus and hear his words just like they do. Yet, this is sadly not the reality everywhere. One of the reasons why so many in Latin America are going to the Pentecostal churches, and why so many ex-Catholics are found in storefront pentecostal churches in our country is because they expected to find a real love of the Word of God in Catholic Churches, but in many places didn’t. People are hungering for Jesus to nourish them with the word of life and they need to find him.
• Third, we need to reveal Jesus by the joy we have in encountering him in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. When they come to Catholic Churches, they anticipate that they’re going to find people who are the most joyous on earth, who rejoice to be in the presence of God, who know how blessed they are to be called to the Supper of the Lord. They expect to see incredible reverence for God who comes down from heaven to earth and hides himself humbly and miraculously under the appearances of bread and wine. They expect to find people who are giving their best in terms of prayer and singing, who are wearing their best, who are behaving the best. They want to befriend people who are centering their lives of Jesus in the Eucharist as the source and summit of their life, who order their entire life around the celebration of Mass rather than just try to squeeze it in and check it off a to do list. And, yet, when they come to churches in many places, that’s not their experience. One of the reasons why there is a need for the Eucharistic Revival in the Church in our country is because the worship in a good percentage of the 17,000 Catholic churches in the country is rather moribund. The first pillar in the parish phase of the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival is to “revitalize worship,” so that through the way we celebrate Mass we communicate clearly and contagiously that we are celebrating the truth that the same Christ who was in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, the same Christ who was lifted up on the Cross, the same Christ who rose from the dead, is here with us. If we don’t celebrate with that joy and reverence, if we don’t behave like those who see and encounter and receive Jesus in the Eucharist, it is harder for everyone — Catholics who are growing in faith or with doubt, non-Catholics with questions, and others — to see Jesus, too.
• Fourth, we need to reveal Jesus by the love we have for others. He called us to love others as he has loved us first. When people come to Catholic Churches, they anticipate they’re going to encounter love, love for them, love for each other, love for those who are not there. They expect to find a community where not only everyone knows each other’s names, but where they care for each other, cheer each other up when they’re down or suffering, help each other when they’re struggling, pray for each other, and enjoy each other’s company. They expect that the Catholics they meet are going to sacrifice to care for those in need, through the corporal and especially spiritual works of mercy, passing on the faith to others with zeal as the greatest good and charity to others as a real privilege. They also expect — and deeply desire — that others are going to look at them with the eyes of Jesus, warmly embrace them into the community, help them to feel truly at home in God’s house, take an interest in them, and seek to help them become better friends with Jesus and all Jesus’ friends. In short, they expect to see and find Jesus acting in his Mystical Body the Church, which continues to follow the path of the grain of wheat together with the Lord. When they find it, they begin to try to make up for lost time. When they don’t find it, they become spiritually disoriented and their restless hearts can begin to look elsewhere.
• The greatest way of all we find Jesus in this world is in his real presence in the Holy Eucharist. He 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. Jesus in the Eucharist is the divine response to the hunger of all humanity that longs not just to see God’s face but to become one with him in love. 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. 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 Jesus, who gave his body and blood when he was lifted on the Cross, continues to be elevated and to give that body and blood for the world. It’s at Mass that he seeks to transform us, as we do this in memory of him, to follow him down the path of self-giving love for our and others’ salvation. We wish to see Jesus and here we behold the Lamb of God who not only takes away the sins of the world, but comes to see us, feed us and send us forth as grains of wheat to be scattered fruitfully throughout the world. The Eucharist is the means by which, through our transformation by the Sacrament of love into a sacrament of love, that we become Jesus’ face, his hands, his feet, his heart in the world, and so be able to draw everyone onto his path, the path of the exodus that lead to life eternal. This is the ultimate meaning of Lent. This is, as Pope Benedict tells us, the essence of love and indeed of human life itself. This is the Gospel of the Lord.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download