Homily for 5th Sunday of Lent

Homily for the
5th Sunday of Lent
March 25, 2012
John 12: 20-33
Jer 31: 31-34
St. Vincent’s Hospital, Harrison, N.Y.

Mar. 25-31 was a hectic week in the office and with a family funeral. I totally forgot to post the homily! Sorry 'bout that.

“Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life” (John 12:25).

If you want to live, you have to die. If you want to be happy, you have to sacrifice yourself. If you want to be honored, you have to be a servant.* If you wonder why everyone in the world hasn’t become Christian, you might have a clue in these paradoxes, based on the teaching and the example of our Master, the Lord Jesus Christ.

When Jesus presents these teachings, he’s presenting his own life: “Whoever serves me must follow me” (12:26), i.e. must follow his example; must follow the same path thru life and thru death—death to self, and finally physical death—in order to arrive where Jesus is now: “Where I am, there also will my servant be. The Father will honor whoever serves me” (12:26).



As Jesus carries his cross, his mother meets him along the way--the traditional 4th Station of the Via Crucis, and an apt symbol of the participation of every disciple in the passion of the Lord. (Stations of Our Lady of the Point, Pittsburgh)

Jesus didn’t have to suffer persecution from the scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees—the leaders of the Jewish people. He didn’t have to be crucified by the Romans, to “suffer under Pontius Pilate,” as our Creed professes every Sunday. He could have backed off when people objected to what he said and did. He could have, as the politicians say, “gone along in order to get along.” He could have preached what everyone else preached, and done what everyone else did. Or he could have not preached or taught at all—just stayed in Nazareth working as a carpenter like his foster-father, married, raised a family, and been a good, religious Jew.

But that wasn’t what his Father sent him into the world to do and to teach. God sent him to “make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant I made with their fathers” (Jer 31:31-32). This new covenant would not be written on stone but “upon their hearts”; it would be an internalized relationship and not one of merely external observance (31:33).

It would, moreover, be all inclusive: “All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the Lord” (31:34). It would even include disreputable people. It would even include Gentiles. “I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners shall return to you,” says today’s psalm (51:15).

Jesus would preach God’s universal love and forgiveness. He would preach and practice what we today call the dignity and worth of every person—male or female, rich or poor, Jew or Gentile—in God’s eyes, and insist that this is the “new law” written on the heart of all God’s friends, which they should believe and practice: “Whoever serves me must follow me.”

Jesus was persecuted by those who found such a teaching threatening—to their own status and power or to their comfort level or to their sinful ways. His adherence to the truth—to conscience, we might say today—and his practice of what he believed brought him what John’s gospel calls his “hour,” i.e. his passion and death; and thru his passion and death, his glorification: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23), which means to share in God the Father’s glory, in God’s life.

Jesus compares his impending passion and death with the sowing of seeds of wheat: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit” (12:24). If he’d just stayed in Nazareth making tables and doorframes; if he’d just taught the same interpretations of the Torah as everyone else did—then he’d just have been a grain of wheat in a jar or on a rock. By faithfully preaching God’s truth, and dying for that, “he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Heb 5:9). His Father “saved him from death” (Heb 5:7) by raising him from the grave, and his Father empowered him to save everyone who follows him: “Where I am, there also will my servant be. The Father will honor whoever serves me.” “When I am lifted up from the earth”—this refers to his crucifixion—“I will draw everyone to myself” (John 12:32).

To follow Jesus, we likewise have to die: which means not only our eventual physical death, but, as the gospel today says, “hating our lives in this world,” being willing to die to what the world counts as important, being willing to die to our own selfishness. What does the world think is important? Money! Power! Sex! Fame! These things drive politics. They drive international relations. They drive popular entertainment. They drive our family and business relationships. And they threaten to drive us—to where? To eternal life? You know that’s not true. In the news on Thursday, we learned that Whitney Houston drowned in a bathtub, with cocaine and other substances in her body. She had it all, didn’t she? Talent, fame, money, looks. But, evidently, not happiness, not joy, what we would call a satisfied life. You could find an endless parade of similar examples of divorce, suicide, substance abuse, criminal activity—and of war, genocide, the drug trade, human trafficking, racism—demonstrating that “whoever loves his life loses it.” Whoever lives for fame and fortune, for pleasure and for power, ultimately is miserable, lonely, living already in hell.

But, promises Jesus, if we live for others, if we respect others, if we serve others; if we listen to what he teaches, if we love truth and try to follow our consciences rather than what’s popular or politically correct—then we’ll find contentment and joy: “Whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. The Father will honor whoever serves me.”

* A little vocabulary note: in the Greek text here, the words for “serve” and “servant” are diakone and diakonos, whence our English word deacon.