Homily for 5th Sunday of Lent

Homily for the
5th Sunday of Lent

March 21, 2021
Heb 5: 7-9
Ps 51: 3-4, 12-15
Collect
Holy Name of Jesus, New Rochelle, N.Y.                                                      

“In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (Heb 5: 7).

Agony in the Garden (El Greco)

We’re all familiar with Jesus’ agony in the garden before his arrest.  The Letter to the Hebrews gives us a variation on that picture.  We can picture Jesus prostrate in prayer to his Father, crying and begging to be spared from his passion and death, in the same way that any of us might pray to be spared from some frightening experience that we foresee:  an unpleasant responsibility at work, a job loss, a surgery, the ravages of illness, the death of someone we love deeply.

It’s a little startling that the author of this letter asserts that Jesus “was heard because of his reverence.”  But he actually was arrested.  He really did undergo terrible tortures.  He was truly, barbarically, shamefully executed.  How is that being “heard,” being “saved from death”?

We know, of course, that Jesus’ passion and death weren’t the end of his story.  We know that God the Father raised him from death—what Hebrews describes as being “made perfect” (5:9).  God created human beings for life, not for death; the perfection of a human being is life without death; healthy, eternal life.  This Jesus attained after suffering, like all human beings, and then being raised.

The Letter to the Hebrews affirms that Christ Jesus “learned obedience from what he suffered” (5:8).  All his human life, Jesus Christ lived as we do, with troubles, disappointments, pain.  Like us, he had to learn to accept these as part of his life, and to offer these to his Father in obedience, reverently.  We heard in last week’s gospel that God loved the world so much that he gave us his only Son (John 3:16); that is, he gave him to us be one of us.  It was obedience for the Son to lower himself from heaven to earth, to lay aside—to hide—his divinity and become one of us.  But because he did that, he was the perfect human being, the ideal child of God that each of us is supposed to be but falls so short of. 

by Noel Coypel

Jesus’ obedience was rewarded with resurrection, and, Hebrews continues, “he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (5:9).  His humanity is our humanity; our humanity is elevated, saved, thru his, thru our union with him, thru our obedience to his teaching, to his way of life.

That’s what Lent is about, dear sisters and brothers:  being converted to Jesus’ teaching, to his way of life, turning from our sins to “the one who [is] able to save [us] from death.”  So we pray in today’s responsorial psalm that God will “create a clean heart” in us (51:12), that in his great compassion he’ll “wipe out our offense” (cf. 51:3), all our offenses, all the ways in which we’ve violated his covenant, the laws he’s given to show us how to live in his ways.

We pray that God will “give back the joy of [his] salvation” (51:14); that he’ll be “the source of eternal salvation” for us who follow Jesus Christ—that he’ll empower us to stay with Jesus and live as he teaches us:  “whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be.  The Father will honor whoever serves me,” Jesus teaches in today’s gospel (John 12:26).

In today’s Collect, we prayed that with God’s help we would “walk eagerly in that same charity with which [Jesus] handed himself over to death.”  Jesus sacrificed himself out of love for us, giving himself to us so that we might have eternal life.  How can we “walk eagerly in that same charity”?  By striving to love others sacrificially—to love the members of our family when it’s hard to do; to be patient and understanding with our co-workers or employers or employees, and people we meet in the supermarket or on the streets, and with our neighbors.  It’s sacrificial to bite our tongues rather than speak a rash judgment or pass along gossip.  It’s sacrificial not to take something that isn’t ours, and even more to share what we have with someone who’s in need.  It’s sacrificial to forgive an offense, to overlook a fault.  Those are some of the ways that we can “walk eagerly in that same charity with which [Jesus] handed himself over,” and we can be a little bit like Jesus, that perfect human being who is for us “the source of eternal life.”