The Power of Intercessory Prayer, Fourth Thursday of Lent, March 26, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent
March 26, 2020
Ex 32:7-14, Ps 106, Jn 5:31-47

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the first reading we have a powerful witness of intercessory prayer. The Israelites had given into idolatry and worshipped a golden calf and Moses begged God to forgive their sin. Like with Abraham’s prayer to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten just people were found there, so Moses’ intercession has always been considered a model of prayer. Back in 2011, Pope Benedict, in his great catecheses on Christian prayer, said about it: “Just as for the two cities in Abraham’s day, the punishment and destruction — in which God’s anger is expressed as the rejection of evil — demonstrate the gravity of the sin committed; at the same time, the request of the intercessor is intended to show the Lord’s desire for forgiveness. This is God’s salvation which involves mercy, but at the same time also the denunciation of the truth of the sin, of the evil that exists, so that the sinner, having recognized and rejected his sin, may let God forgive and transform him. In this way prayers of intercession make active in the corrupt reality of sinful man divine mercy which finds a voice in the entreaty of the person praying and is made present through him wherever there is a need for salvation. Moses’ supplication was wholly based on the Lord’s fidelity and grace. He referred first to the history of redemption which God began by bringing Israel out of Egypt and then recalled the ancient promise made to the Fathers. The Lord brought about salvation by freeing his people from slavery in Egypt; so ‘why,’ Moses asked, ‘should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?’’ (Ex 32:12). Once the work of salvation has been begun it must be brought to completion; were God to let his people perish, this might be interpreted as a sign of God’s inability to bring the project of salvation to completion. God cannot allow this: he is the good Lord who saves, the guarantor of life, he is the God of mercy and forgiveness, of deliverance from sin that kills. Hence Moses appealed to God, to the interior life of God against the exterior judgement. But, Moses then argued with the Lord, were his Chosen People to perish, even though guilty, God might appear incapable of overcoming sin. And this he could not accept. … The intercessor wanted the People of Israel to be saved because this people was the flock which had been entrusted to him, but also because it was in this salvation that the true reality of God was manifest. The prayer of intercession is permeated by love of the brethren and love of God, they are inseparable. Moses, the intercessor, is the man torn between two loves that overlap in prayer in a single desire for good.   … The intercessor did not ask for his people to be excused of their sin, he did not list any presumed merits, either the people’s or his own, but appealed to God’s bounty: a free God, total love, who does not cease to seek out those who have fallen away, who is always faithful to himself, who offers the sinner a chance to return to him and, through forgiveness, to become righteous and capable of fidelity. Moses asked God to show himself more powerful than sin and death, and with his prayer elicited this divine revelation of himself. … With prayer, wanting what God wanted, the intercessor entered more and more deeply into knowledge of the Lord and of his mercy, and became capable of a love that extended even to the total gift of himself.”
• Pope Benedict then applied these lessons to Jesus and to us. First to Jesus: “In Moses, on the summit of the mountain face to face with God, who made himself an intercessor for his people and offered himself — ‘blot me out’ — the Fathers of the Church saw a prefiguration of Christ who from the very top of the Cross was truly before God, not only as a friend but as Son. And not only did he offer himself — “blot me out” — but with his pierced heart he had himself blotted out, he himself became sin, as St Paul himself says, he took upon himself our sins to ensure our salvation. His intercession was not only solidarity but identification with us: he bears all of us in his Body. And thus his whole life as a man and as Son is a cry to God’s heart, it is forgiveness, but forgiveness that transforms and renews.” Then to us: “We should meditate upon this reality. Christ stands before God and is praying for me. His prayer on the Cross is contemporary with all human beings, contemporary with me. He prays for me, he suffered and suffers for me, he identified himself with me, taking our body and the human soul. And he asks us to enter this identity of his, making ourselves one body, one spirit with him because from the summit of the Cross he brought not new laws, tablets of stone, but himself, his Body and his Blood, as the New Covenant. Thus he brings us kinship with him, he makes us one body with him, identifies us with him. He invites us to enter into this identification, to be united with him in our wish to be one body, one spirit with him. Let us pray the Lord that this identification may transform and renew us, because forgiveness is renewal and transformation.”
• We see the intercession of Christ in today’s Gospel. Like Moses with the stiff-necked Israelites, Jesus was trying to bring the hard-hearted Scribes and Pharisees to conversion so that they might be able to receive the mercy God wanted to bestow. It wasn’t easy. Today’s scene continues Jesus’ response to the Scribes and Pharisees who were opposing him as evil because he healed on the Sabbath day the man crippled for 38 years. They had imputed their own false ideas of the holiness God wanted us to keep on the Sabbath day to God and then, because Jesus violated those false ideas, condemned him for the violation. They thought that the holiness God wanted was to avoid any work at all, including works of charity; what God had forbidden was in fact slavish work so that, instead of enslaving ourselves on the Sabbath, we would allow him to restore us to true freedom, a freedom that is meant to make it possible for us to love. The holiness God wanted us to keep on the Sabbath was most of all that of loving Him and loving neighbor. God doesn’t take a weekly day off from loving us — as if a loving father or mother could take a hiatus from caring for their children — and never intended us to do the same. The Pharisees’ and Scribes’ misunderstanding of the Sabbath was at the root of their deep confusion of what God was asking of them in general, something of which Jesus wanted to cure them, if only their hearts were open.
• In today’s passage Jesus discusses the whole question of the authority by which he was working these miracles, especially the ones on the Sabbath. Since they didn’t believe he could possibly be working miracles on the Sabbath by God’s power — because God in their imagination went on vacation each Sabbath — he had to be doing so by some other authority. Elsewhere they explicitly accused him of working miracles on the Sabbath by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons, in other words basically to destroy the Jewish religion! So Jesus here takes up the question of authority and the question of the witnesses or testimony to his authority. He names five of them. It’s key for us to understand these five witnesses, so that we can grow in our knowledge of Jesus through these five different means of testimony. It’s also key so that in turn, because of his life growing within each of us and within the Christian communion, we can in turn become a “sixth witness,” like the members of the early Church were and as saints always are.
• The first witness is John the Baptist, who had pointed out Jesus as the Lamb of God. Jesus said, “You sent emissaries to John, and he testified to the truth. I do not accept human testimony, but I say this so that you may be saved.” John had pointed out Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Jesus would ask them explicitly, when they peppered him with questions to test him, whether they accepted the testimony of John, and they refused to say either way. The point is that, though they were fascinated by John, they didn’t accept John’s testimony and the offer of salvation that would be brought by the Lamb he indicated through the forgiveness of their sins.
• The second witness was the works Jesus was doing. Jesus says, “But I have testimony greater than John’s” and then immediately describes that greater witness: “The works that the Father gave me to accomplish, these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.” He could only do what he was doing — healing the sick, casting out demons, raising the dead, multiplying loaves and fish, calming storms — by the power of God. But they didn’t want to accept the testimony of the works, works that the Messiah had been prophesied to accomplish and many more. Their hearts were hardened and there was just no way they were prepared to receive Jesus, no matter what he did. Even after he rose from the dead, they didn’t want to accept even that work, but instead paid off the guards to say, absurdly, that the disciples had stolen his body while they were asleep (when they could not possibly have known what happened to the body not to mention identify any thief). Because they were going to reject Jesus no matter what, they rejected the divine provenance of all of his works.
• The third witness is Sacred Scripture. Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures, because you think you have eternal life through them; even they testify on my behalf. But you do not want to come to me to have life.” There are over 1,000 prophecies about the coming Messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus by that point had been fulfilling almost everything on the Messianic job description except for the prophecies of his suffering, death and resurrection that were about to come. But as much as they affirmed themselves as experts in the Scriptures, they obstinately resisted the conclusion that any of them pointed to Jesus, despite the fact that he was fulfilling each of them.
• The fourth witness Jesus mentions is Moses. Jesus says, “Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father: the one who will accuse you is Moses, in whom you have placed your hope. For if you had believed Moses, you would have believed me, because he wrote about me.  But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” All Moses accomplished was together one long prophecy about Jesus. His going up on the Mt. Sinai and returning with the Ten Commandments pointed to how Jesus ascended the Mount of the Beatitudes and gave us the New Law. His leading the Jews in the Passover was a prophecy about what Jesus himself would do through his new and eternal Passover, leading us through the desert of life and death into the Eternal Promised Land. Moses’ interceding for the Israelites before God on the mountain, like in today’s first reading, was a prophecy of Jesus’ praying on the hill of Calvary for God the Father to forgive us because we didn’t know what we were doing. Moses had told the Jews, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him” (Deut 18:15). That prophecy was still very much awaiting fulfillment at the time of St. John the Baptist, who was asked by the crowds, “Are you the prophet?” (Jn 1:21). No, Jesus in fact was. But they didn’t want to accept that testimony. They didn’t want to listen to him. As Pope Benedict indicated above, Jesus was also the fulfillment of Moses’ action in today’s first reading as well, interceding for the people’s salvation before God the Father on account of their idolatry. Moses had asked God to eliminate him rather than the people. That request would be, in essence, fulfilled in the Passion, when Jesus, the new Moses, would actually be killed as an expiatory sacrifice for the sins of the people. But they didn’t want to accept any of that fulfillment of Moses’ life either.
• The fifth witness is the most important. It’s God the Father. “The Father who sent me has testified on my behalf,” Jesus said. “But you have never heard his voice nor seen his form, and you do not have his word remaining in you, because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent.” This witness was pointed to in all of the other four. It’s God the Father who called John the Baptist to prepare the way for his Son. It’s God the Father who was speaking through each of Jesus’ miracles. It’s God the Father who inspired Sacred Scripture by the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s God the Father who called Moses at the burning bush, sent him to Pharaoh, worked the 10 plagues, separated the Red Sea, fed the Israelites with Manna and quail, quenched their thirst with water from the Rock, gave the Ten Commandments, accompanied them in a pillar of fire and so much more. But all of that testimony was, in a certain sense, indirect. God the Father gave direct testimony of Jesus at his baptism, saying from heaven, “This is my Son, my beloved, in whom I am well-pleased.” God the Father gave direct testimony at the Transfiguration, witnessed by Peter, James and John, in which he said, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him!” God the Father would later give witness to Jesus, not only speaking during the Last Supper that he had glorified Jesus’ name and would glorify it again, but most spectacularly by raising Jesus from the dead on the third day. But they weren’t prepared to receive the testimony of God either.
• Today, four weeks into the Lenten conversion God wants to work in us, we need to ask ourselves how docile we are to everything God has given us to strengthen our faith and help us to grow in our relationship with Jesus. Have we accepted the testimony of John the Baptist pointing to Jesus as the Lamb of God taking away the sins of the world by coming to that Lamb to have him take away our sins in the Sacrament of God’s mercy and get at them at the real roots? Have we accepted the witness of so many miracles — the miracles in the causes of saints, the daily miracles on the altar and the confessional, and so many others —  to help increase our faith in the power of prayer by praying with perseverance for the miracles we and others need? Have we embraced the witness of Sacred Scripture by studying the Bible, all it reveals about Christ and about us, and putting its words into practice? Have we accepted the witness of Moses pointing to Christ and have we really begun to follow the New Moses, Jesus, up close or, like many of the Jews in the desert, have we sought to do our own thing? And have we heard the witness of God the Father and really begun to listen to Jesus and recognize through him that God wants us not only to be but behave always as his beloved and much-pleasing sons and daughters?
• It’s also a time to look at the power of intercessory prayer and to recognize that throughout the Lenten season, each of us individually, and the whole Church, turns to the Father and begs him, on account of the work of his Son, to have mercy on us and on the whole world. Last night, as the world continues to confront the coronavirus, the bishops of many countries together with the Cardinal Marto of Fatima, begged for God’s help against the virus, praying for those suffering and who have died, praying for health care workers, praying for civil leaders, praying for the faithful and for all affected. This work of intercession must grow. Pope Francis is trying to lead this with various opportunities for worldwide prayer, like yesterday with the worldwide recitation of the Our Father, last Thursday and the international prayer of the Rosary, and tomorrow night a global Urbi et Orbi prayer from St. Peter’s Square. We do this together with Christ, as Body with Head, as Bride with Bridegroom.
• The Eucharist is what all five of these witnesses point to. This is the fulfillment of the Manna given to Moses in the desert. This is the Lamb of God pointed out with the very words of John the Baptist at every Mass. This is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Sacred Scripture contained in Isaiah that God will prepare for us a banquet of the choicest food and drink (Is 25). This is the greatest of all of Jesus’ signs of love, transforming simple bread and wine into his body and blood, soul and divinity, so that we can enter into a holy communion with him. And this is the greatest gift of all of the Father, who witnesses just how dear we are to him that he will give us the One is most precious to Him so that we can by this reception of his body and blood enter into the inner life and love of the Trinity. Let us accept this witness and let us in turn become the “sixth” witnesses whose whole lives attest, not just on the Sabbath but on every day, to the truth of Jesus’ continuing saving presence and redemptive work. The Eucharist is the great prayer of intercession lifted up for the world, in which we enter live into Christ’s prayer of intercession from the Upper Room and Calvary — and God’s response on Easter Sunday!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel
JN 5:31-47

Jesus said to the Jews:
“If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not true.
But there is another who testifies on my behalf,
and I know that the testimony he gives on my behalf is true.
You sent emissaries to John, and he testified to the truth.
I do not accept human testimony,
but I say this so that you may be saved.
He was a burning and shining lamp,
and for a while you were content to rejoice in his light.
But I have testimony greater than John’s.
The works that the Father gave me to accomplish,
these works that I perform testify on my behalf
that the Father has sent me.
Moreover, the Father who sent me has testified on my behalf.
But you have never heard his voice nor seen his form,
and you do not have his word remaining in you,
because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent.
You search the Scriptures,
because you think you have eternal life through them;
even they testify on my behalf.
But you do not want to come to me to have life.

“I do not accept human praise;
moreover, I know that you do not have the love of God in you.
I came in the name of my Father,
but you do not accept me;
yet if another comes in his own name,
you will accept him.
How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another
and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God?
Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father:
the one who will accuse you is Moses,
in whom you have placed your hope.
For if you had believed Moses,
you would have believed me,
because he wrote about me.
But if you do not believe his writings,
how will you believe my words?”