5th Sunday in Lent

God promises in the first reading from Jeremiah that with the New Covenant he will make with the house of Israel and the house of Judah he will forgive evildoing and will remember their sin no more.  Once our evildoing is forgiven, God does not remember our sins.  Our God is that good to us.  We hear each time we are at Mass that the Blood of Jesus is the New and Eternal Covenant.  Jesus gave up His Body and His Blood so that we would be forgiven and our sins would be forgotten.

All of us sin.  We sin often.  We sometimes sin seriously.  So this is Good News to know that we can be forgiven and all can be forgotten, but first we need to admit that we have sinned and then ask for forgiveness.  That is not always easy to do and to confess our sins to a priest in order to receive absolution can be very humbling.  But we all have to do that.  And when we do, God forgives and forgets and fills us with grace.

Once we are forgiven, we begin again to be obedient.  The second reading from the letter to the Hebrews tells us that Jesus, even though He was the Son of God, learned to be obedient through what He suffered.  His suffering shows us how to be faithful to God and how much God loves us.  Suffering makes us more like Jesus.  When we die to ourselves, God can work more powerfully through us.  We look to the needs of others and in doing do, become more like Jesus.

In today’s gospel, some Greeks went to Philip and said, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” They had heard about Jesus and they wanted to see Him.  In St. John’s gospel, to see means to believe, and to believe in Jesus brings eternal life.  Do we have a desire each day to see Jesus, to believe in Him, to have eternal life with him?  Too often, we take the Lord for granted and forget we need to see Him and believe in Him for eternal life.  

In response to the Greeks’ request, Philip went to Andrew, and then Andrew and Philip went to Jesus.  The two apostles did what they could to make sure the Greeks saw Jesus.  When is the last time, we helped others to see Jesus, as Andrew and Philip did? There may be people in our lives who won’t come to know Jesus without our help.  Jesus needs us and relies on us to bring others to Him.

Jesus teaches in today’s gospel that if we want to live, we have to die.  If we want to preserve our life for eternity, we have to hate our life here.  And if we want to serve Him, we have to follow Him, and that will entail suffering.  His hour is coming and with a certain urgency Jesus wants all to know what they need to do.

In today’s gospel, God the Father speaks with thunder and assures Jesus that He has glorified His name and will do it again.  Jesus explains that this is the time for judgment and for defeating the ruler of this world, the devil.  And when He is lifted up from the earth on the Cross, He will draw everyone to Himself. 

In these last 10 days of Lent before the Triduum begins, we make our way to the Cross to remember again that we are forgiven and we are loved, and we are called to live and to die as Jesus did.