5th Sunday in Lent

Date: Sunday March 29, 2009 5th Sunday in Lent Readings: Jeremiah 31:31-34 Psalm 51:3-4,12-15 Psalm Response: "Create a clean heart in me O God!" Hebrews 5:7-9 John 12: 20-33
Today's readings have a theme of repentance and forgiveness! Jeremiah was just a kid when God called him to be His spokesman among the people of Israel and Judah. Jeremiah really didn't want the job. However, God's request is like a burning hunger. He couldn't refuse and even when his words fell on deaf ears, his inability to convince them still wouldn't permit him to throw up his hands and give up.
In our pericope today, Jeremiah presents a picture of the plan God has for the people of His unrequited love. They had toned down, forgot and even ignored, not only Jeremiah, but also every spokesperson He sent. However, God's love was not like theirs. He wants them to be saved, to be with Him for all eternity, Therefore, He promises to replace the Law written on stone tablets, with a covenant etched into our hearts throbbing with love and ever reminding us of our obligation. Not to receive a reward but to uphold a bargain made by God to our forefathers. God will never forget His Covenant even if we forget ours. He will forgive us even as we fail to forgive, He will always remain with us even if we are searching for other gods.
With the Psalmist, we implore God to replace our stone, cold hearts with renewed hearts of flesh, warmly embracing those God places in proximity to us. Neighbors who are physically near and those who are out of sight. Both are in need of our love as they are of God's love.
The writers of Hebrews describe Jesus' very human reaction to the prospect of death. Jesus knew His death was a part of the process of salvation and He is recoiled by the thought, just as we would be. He prayed, He begged, He cried to be released from the prospect of death. However, He obediently fulfilled the veiled reference to the Messiah's sacrificial death, for the sake of mankind. What a treasure for us, given out of His love for us.
To show death with positive aspects, John, to express an agricultural reality, gives Christ the metaphor of the seed to plant, to point out His sacrifice isn't all a downer, He describes the death and corruption of a grain of wheat as the beginning of a plant. The plant grows and soon bears fruit, in kind, able to recreate itself and become many grains of wheat.
Combined, the readings present the pattern of the life, the death and the resurrection, all of us must go through in order for God's plan to reach reality. Christ is the pattern. We as His followers may not have to surrender our lives for others. However, we should always be prepared, if called, like He was!
Alternate readings for the fifth Sunday in Lent;
Ezekiel 37:12-14 Psalm 130: 1-8 Romans 8: 8-11 John 11: 1-45
The Gospel story of Lazarus, Mary's and Martha's brother, is a foretaste of the expectations all Christians should have about the last days of our lives.
All of us will physically die. This was the loss attributed to the fall of our first parents. As Paul points out, our physical bodies will not please God. We were made of and will return to dust as our Ash Wednesday experience tells us. However, we receive the Holy Spirit at our Baptism and acquire an incorruptible spirit. It will survive our mortal remains and become pleasing to God the Father, who wills all to be saved. He had Jesus established our Church to guide us, as it is guided by the Spirit, to a divine essence, pure and holy. Thereby, we will be able to appear before the throne of God fully in His image and likeness, as was intended by His creation of mankind.
In this way, Scripture is fulfilled as Ezekiel manifests in today's reading. We will rise from our graves because we adhered to His will and became, thereby, an alter ego of His Son. Our eternal reward is not a tangible and mortal substance, but a spiritual, immortal and intangible essence ready and anxious to be of eternal service in the court of God.
The Psalmist opens with the declaration of our knowledge of an interim manifestation of corruption of the body. From the depths of the netherworld, we cry out for justice and God delivers us into His Holy sanctuary. He points to the forgiveness of God even though we may ignore Him and His ordinances as long as our final breath calls to Him for absolution.
Paul uses his knowledge of the Spirit, given to him in Baptism in Antioch, to advise the Romans they, too, are filled with the Holy Spirit as he is. When our first parents were created, they were pure and sacred. They had divine attributes, Through their disobedience, they lost the immortality of God’s image and thereby had to suffer the corruption attendant to our nature without the Spirit. We still have to undergo the death of our bodies. However, the spiritual nature will never die.
The attraction of Jesus for the Greeks wasn’t the signs He performed so much as His ability to present Himself as the eternal son of God. They were converts to Judaism and wanted to be fully incorporated into the body of believers. Jesus, to them, was more to their liking than the Jewish leaders. So, they asked to be introduced to Jesus in order to be able to discern, for themselves, what it was attracting so many adherents.
Jesus then presented His case! He was to be vilified, beaten and finally killed because He did what He was sent, by the Father to do.
As an example to us, He was obedient to the end. Not like our first parents who weren’t satisfied with their lot, but, like Satan, wanted more. If we analyze our lives, we can see the parallel if we decide to go it alone, instead of following Him to the end!