Homily for 2d Sunday of Lent

Homily for the
2d Sunday of Lent

Feb. 28, 2021
Rom 8: 31-34                                                
Holy Name of Jesus, New Rochelle, N.Y.                                                   
“God did not spare his own Son” (Rom 8: 32).

The reading from the Book of Genesis this morning shocks us with God’s command to Abraham to offer his only as a sacrifice, even if God intervenes at the last second to stop him from killing Isaac (Gen 22).  That story is a fitting backdrop for St. Paul’s words about God’s care for us, God’s protection of us.

For God sent his Son into the world to live among us and even to die among us, to be entirely one of us.  God “handed him over for us all” (8:32), left him in the hands of evil and unjust men, Jerusalem’s powerful religious leaders and Rome’s imperial authorities.  Paul asserts that Jesus’ life and death is evidence that “God is for us” (8:31); he’s on our side in our struggles against whatever’s evil and unjust in this world.  Jesus Christ is proof of God’s solidarity with the human race, with each of us individually.  As St. John writes, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (3:16).

Christ carrying his cross

(St. John of the Cross Monastery, Segovia)

It’s true that “Christ Jesus died” (8:34) when he submitted to sinful men.  But God raised him from death and raised him to an exalted place in heaven—foreshadowed by Jesus’ transfiguration, as we hear in today’s gospel (Mark 9:2-10).  There he now “intercedes for us” (8:34).  If God has done that for Jesus, who is our human brother but who was faithful to God always—as we are not—we may be sure that God, who sent his Son among us to lead us back to faithfulness, will “give us everything else along with him” (8:32).

What is “everything else”?  Paul tells us that when we sinful human beings stand before God for judgment, God will acquit us thru Jesus, “who is at the right hand of God” and “intercedes for us” (8:34).  Even if Satan, God’s unrelenting enemy, the bitterest enemy of our souls, should “bring a charge against” us, we are “God’s chosen ones” (8:33).  God has chosen us to belong to his Son, and as long as we cling in faith to the Son, no one, not even Satan, can condemn us to eternal death.  God’s Son has been raised, and he’s been raised that we might live with him.  “Everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”

Therefore we need not fear death, need not fear to stand before God.  “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (8:31).  Not Satan, not all the demons in hell, and not our sins that we’ve brought penitently to Christ our Lord “who intercedes for us” and whose death has obtained redemption for us.

“If God is for us, who can be against us?”  The political powers of this world may oppose us, as they did Jesus.  We remember that Christians in Paul’s time endured religious persecution, like many of our fellow believers today.  In 2019 almost 3,000 Christians were killed for their faith, and last year over 2,000 were killed by jihadists just in Nigeria, while an estimated 260 million face various forms of persecution and religious discrimination from Communists, radical Muslims and Hindus, and various revolutionary regimes.  In our own country, we face harassment and discrimination, e.g., by having our churches vandalized and statues of our saints torn down.  We run the risk of fines and the loss of livelihood—like the Little Sisters of the Poor, like Catholic hospitals, doctors, and adoption agencies, like Christian bakers, florists, and photographers—if we refuse to go along with widely prevailing, immoral cultural and political policies, such as those concerning abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and transgenderism on some college campuses and those that would be imposed by a bill which passed the House of Representatives on Friday with the full support of the Biden Administration.   It’s harmlessly titled the “Equality Bill” but has little equality about it for a Christian conscience.

The Responsorial Psalm proclaimed, “I believed, even when I said, ‘I am greatly afflicted.’  My vows to the Lord I will pay in the presence of all his people” (116:10,14).  Our belief in Christ Jesus is the faith that sustains us against anyone “who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones” (8:33) in this world or in the next, against any affliction.  God didn’t spare his own Son from combat against Satan and against human injustice, and God will enable us, his chosen ones, to overcome our personal sins and whatever other evil may come at us, so that we may prevail with Christ and pay homage to our Father in heaven forever.