The Image of the Father’s Mercy, Fourth Wednesday of Lent, April 2, 2014

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Bernadette Parish, Fall River, MA
Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Lent
April 2, 2014
Is 49:8-15, Ps 145, Jn 5:17-30

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On Ash Wednesday, we pondered how the whole point of Lent is to help us enter into Communion with God the Father. Jesus called us to pray, fast and give alms differently than all the rest. He taught us to pray not for others to see but in intimacy with the Father in our inner room, whether we’re all alone inside a house or in the midst of a crowd. He told us to fast not so that others may notice but so that we can come to share God’s hunger to care for all his sons and daughters. He instructed us to give alms not to win others’ praise but as an extension of the Father’s providential care for us. The entire point of Lent is for us to realize what both the younger and the older sons in the Parable of the Prodigal Son failed to grasp: the enormous treasure of the love of the Father who gives us everything he has and to live in communion with that love.
• Jesus is the image of the Father who came to reveal to us the Father’s love. But that love was shocking to the various older brothers among the religious class of scribes and Pharisees who wanted to make God in the image of their own rigid ideas. When Jesus healed the man crippled for 38 years in the Pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath, they thought it was a huge sin rather than a manifestation of God’s goodness. They believed that God who rested from creation on the sabbath would take a day off from loving his sons and daughters on the Sabbath just like the Scribes and the Pharisees, who had made the sabbath an idol, were doing. That was the launching pad for Jesus to begin to describe, to their great and easily-scandalized shock and homicidal horror, how he reveals the Father. In today’s passage he gives us three ways he is the icon of the Father.
• The first is that he is the icon of the Father’s work. Jesus says, “My Father is at work until now and so I am at work.” Just as the Father never ceases to do good, so Jesus doesn’t take a day off from charity. At the end of today’s first reading, God tells us through the Prophet Isaiah, “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you.” A mother wasn’t going to allow her breastfeeding child to go without nourishment at any time, but even if a mom were capable of that, God the Father wouldn’t be. That’s why Jesus healed so much on the Sabbath, to overcome the conviction of those who had perverted the Jewish religion to pretend as if God didn’t even want us doing works of charity on the Sabbath.
• The second and third things Jesus revealed concern the type of work he does with the Father: he gives life and he exercises judgment.  Jesus indicates that just as the Father gives life, so the Son likewise gives life even to those who are dead. “For just as the Father raises the dead and gives life, so also does the Son give life to whomever he wishes.” He goes on to describe that this life is a relationship with God the source of all life through hearing his words with faith. “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and will not come to condemnation, but has passed from death to life. Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For just as the Father has life in himself, so also he gave to the Son the possession of life in himself.” We come to life by hearing and obeying what we hear Jesus say. When he raises Lazarus from the dead later, Jesus indicates, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in me, even if he died, will live and no one who lives and believes in me will ever die.” Real life comes through a relationship with him who is the source of all life. Sharing in the life of the Son allows us to enter into the life of the Father. Jesus’ work on earth was so that we “might have life and have it to the full,” and on earth and still in heaven, Jesus never ceases to work so that we might experience that life now and forever.
• Closely associated with that work of giving life, Jesus says, is the work of judgment. Often when we hear the word judgment, most of us can begin to dread it as the time when all our misdeeds will catch up with us. But judgment also have a very positive meaning, too. It will be the time when the Father will say to those who have responded to his offer of life and lived and worked together with him, heard his Son’s words and believed in the Father who sent the Son, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” Jesus in today’s passage tells us, “Nor does the Father judge anyone, but he has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father.” Jesus’ judgment, however, is not arbitrary or fundamentally his own, but as he says later, “I cannot do anything on my own; I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me.” He judges in union with the Father, according to the Father’s criteria, which makes his judgments just. And because Jesus came into the world “not to condemn  the world but so that the world might be saved through him” (Jn 3:17), Jesus, in union with the Father, wants to do everything he can — and has done everything necessary — to help us to follow him along the path of life, the path to his eternal right side, where the judgment will be a canonization instead of a condemnation. He tells us that if we hear (obey) his word and believe in the Father who sent him, we will have “eternal life and not come to condemnation.” That faithful obedience is the path to the “good deeds” of love that will lead us to the “resurrection of life” he describes rather than the “resurrection of condemnation” for those who have refused that love.
• Ultimately the unceasing work of the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit is mercy. Jesus is the incarnation of the Father’s mercy. He is the human face of the God who is “gracious and merciful” as we prayed in the Psalm, the one who “comforts his people and shows mercy to the afflicted.” He is the enfleshment of the Father of the Prodigal Son who not only gave us the lavish inheritance of his grace and love but gave his life to redeem us from the pigsty and from domesticated spiritual slavery.
• Today we celebrate the ninth anniversary of the transitus of Blessed John Paul II who sought to bring us to contemplate the Face of Christ and to discover in his loving countenance the merciful face of God the Father. John Paul II wrote an encyclical on God the Father in 1980 (Dives in Misericordia) that summarized for us very nicely in the first paragraph how Jesus reveals to us the Father’s mercy. It’s worth pondering as we prepare for his canonization in 25 days, because the greatest way to honor him for his holiness is to imitate his faith and this encyclical begins with a great testimony of faith. He writes, “It is ‘God, who is rich in mercy’ whom Jesus Christ has revealed to us as Father: it is His very Son who, in Himself, has manifested Him and made Him known to us. Memorable in this regard is the moment when Philip, one of the twelve Apostles, turned to Christ and said: ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied;’ and Jesus replied: ‘Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me…? He who has seen me has seen the Father.’ These words were spoken during the farewell discourse at the end of the paschal supper, which was followed by the events of those holy days during which confirmation was to be given once and for all of the fact that ‘God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.'” Christ not only reveals to us the Father but the Father through Christ his Son brings raises us from the dead even in physical life and brings us fully alive, allowing us to share in his own life, which is a life rich in mercy.
• John Paul II’s greatest work of all, the main thrust of his Pontificate, was to help us to discover and live what he worked as a young bishop to incorporate in the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, that “Christ, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (GS 22). Christ, who is perfect God and perfect man, reveals not only the Father but who the human person is, and he makes clear his most exalted vocation, to be perfect as the Father is perfect, merciful as the Father is merciful, and holy as the Father is holy. Today as we ponder with Jesus about the Father, let us ask Blessed John Paul II to intercede for us that we may imitate Christ in imitating the Father in his working for the salvation of all people, so that we may have life to the full and come through the resurrection of life to the Father’s eternal embrace.

The readings for today’s Mass were: