Homily for 4th Sunday of Lent

Homily for the
4th Sunday of Lent

March 14, 2021
Eph 2: 4-10
2 Chr 36: 14-16, 19-23
Holy Name of Jesus, New Rochelle, N.Y.                                                      

“God is rich in mercy.  Because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, he brought us to life with Christ” (Eph 2: 4-5).

St. Paul speaks of our transgressions, our sins.  The author of the 2 books of Chronicles speaks of them more specifically:  “All the princes of Judah, the priests, and the people added infidelity to infidelity, practicing all the abominations of the nations…” (2 Chr 36:14).  Those infidelities and abominations included the worship of the false gods of the pagan nations; child sacrifice; the oppression of the poor and the weak by the rich and the powerful; infidelity in marriage; dishonest business practices; working on the Sabbath.

The Chronicler then recounts the doom that befell the kingdom of Judah on account of their sins:  utter destruction, death, captivity, exile (36:19-21).  St. Paul calls us simply “dead in our transgressions.”  Sin, alienation from God our Creator, can have only one, unhappy outcome.

That alienation seems to be the situation of our world today:  millions dead from a pandemic; the earth physically going to pieces with violent storms, uncontrolled wildfires, droughts and famine in some places, massive flooding in others; people tearing each other apart on account of racism, tribalism, nationalism, machismo, religious perversion; drug trafficking, human trafficking, and the use of child soldiers; the perversion of human sexuality in the name of self-expression and freedom, and yes, child sacrifice—the slaughter of millions of unborn children in our supposedly enlightened, civilized Western society.

Is this a happy world?

There’s a fairly new movement in the Western world called antinatalism, a movement that maintains it’s unconscionable to bring children into the world because the world—society, culture, the environment—is so miserable.  It’s a pessimistic, semi-pagan outlook.

Nicodemus and Jesus on a Rooftop (Henry O. Tanner)

What’s the solution to such misery?  Jesus teaches Nicodemus, “The Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15).  (The Son of Man is a biblical redemptive figure, a judge for the End Time.)  St. John comments that God sent his Son into the world “that the world might be saved thru him” (3:17), for God intensely loves the world (cf. 3:16).  Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, was lifted up on the cross for our salvation.

St. John says further that Christ invites us to put our dark and wicked ways behind us and step into the light, to walk in the light.  He states that evildoers prefer the darkness, hate the light, and avoid the light so that their deeds may not be exposed (3:19-20).  Salesians who’ve spent time in Tampa can tell you what happens when you walk into a kitchen or pantry at nite and flip on the light switch:  you may see a great scurrying of palmetto bugs—big cockroaches—fleeing to their dark hiding places under cabinets and behind baseboards—no matter how much cleaning and spraying you do.  Cockroaches and evildoers hate the light.  Now picture the Easter candle entering our dark church on Holy Saturday nite.  “Whoever lives the truth,” St. John asserts, “comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God” (3:21).  The solution to the wickedness of the world is to walk with Christ in divine light, to do his deeds, to speak his truth.

Altho we’re all sinners, altho we all do dark deeds and speak dark words, God is merciful.  St. Paul reminds us of that:  “God is rich in mercy.  Because of the great love he had for us …, he brought us to life with Christ.”  Paul goes on, “He raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavens” (Eph 2:6).  That is, all of us who walk with Christ, who are attached to Christ, are promised a share in Christ’s resurrection and a place with him in eternal life.

This “is the gift of God” (2:8), not something we deserve or earn for ourselves, not something we can boast of (2:9).  It’s only something we can accept and respond to by doing “the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them” (2:10).  Doing the good works of Jesus Christ, by his grace, is the path of life, the solution to the world’s wickedness and darkness.

It’s true that you and I can’t end the violence in Iraq or Nigeria or Burma.  But we can attack the violence in our own society by standing, like Superman, for “truth, justice, and the American way,” beginning in our own families, our own workplaces, our own social gatherings, and standing for the truth and the light of Christ thru appropriate social organizing and political advocacy.

It’s true that we can’t stop hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, or floods.  But we can begin to redress the ways in which the earth is out of kilter with our own efforts to treat the earth, as Pope Francis says, as our common home.

In the Collect this morning we acknowledged that God the Father has reconciled the human race to himself in a wonderful way thru his Word Jesus Christ; and we prayed that “with prompt devotion and eager faith” we might “hasten toward the solemn celebrations to come”—the Easter celebration of the passion, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus, and finally the celebration of Christ’s 2d coming and our final redemption.