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Chr 36:14-16, 19-23
Moreover all the chiefs of the priests, and the people, trespassed
very greatly after all the abominations of the nations; and they polluted
the house of Yahweh which he had made holy in Jerusalem. Yahweh, the God
of their fathers, sent to them by his messengers, rising up early and sending,
because he had compassion on his people, and on his dwelling-place: but
they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and scoffed
at his prophets, until the wrath of Yahweh arose against his people, until
there was no remedy. They burnt the house of God, and broke down
the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all the palaces of it with fire, and destroyed
all the goodly vessels of it. Those who had escaped from the sword carried
he away to Babylon; and they were servants to him and his sons until the
reign of the kingdom of Persia: to fulfill the word of Yahweh by the mouth
of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths: for as long as it
lay desolate it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years. Now in the first
year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of Yahweh by the mouth of Jeremiah
might be accomplished, Yahweh stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia,
so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also
in writing, saying, "Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, All the kingdoms of
the earth has Yahweh, the God of heaven, given me; and he has charged me
to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever there is
among you of all his people, Yahweh his God be with him, and let him go
up."
Ephesians 2:4-10
Brothers and sisters: God, being rich in mercy, for his great love
with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses,
made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and
raised us up with him, and made us to sit with him in the heavenly places
in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches
of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus; for by grace you have
been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of
God, not of works, that no one would boast. For we are his workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that
we would walk in them.
John 3:14-21
Jesus said to Nicodemus, "As Moses lifted up
the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever
believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God didn't
send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should
be saved through him. He who believes in him is not judged. He who doesn't
believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name
of the one and only Son of God. This is the judgment, that the light has
come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light;
for their works were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light,
and doesn't come to the light, lest his works would be exposed. But he
who does the truth comes to the light, that his works may be revealed,
that they have been done in God."
* A
longtime national and international activist in the peace movement, Bishop
Gumbleton is a founding member of Pax Christi USA and an outspoken critic
of the sanctions against Iraq.
He
has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, and has published
numerous articles and reports.
** Scripture texts in this
work are in modified form from the American Standard Version of the Bible
and are available as part of the public domain.
For your convenience, the
Scripture texts, as they appear in the Lectionary for Mass for Use in the
Dioceses of the United States, second typical edition, Copyright ©
1998, 1997, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C.,
may be found at the website of the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops (USCC).
http://www.usccb.org/nab/
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| As I hope you will
recall, on each of the first three Sundays of Lent, we were reminded of
the Covenant that God has made with us, the Covenant by which God becomes
our God and we become God’s people.
The Covenant on the first
Sunday of Lent was spoken to us through the story of Noah and how God gave
the rainbow as the sign of the Covenant. Then we had the story of
Abraham and Isaac and how God rejected human sacrifice and then entered
into a new covenant with Abraham whereby he promised Abraham that he would
be, together with Sara, the parents of a whole new people -- God’s people.
Then last Sunday we remembered the Sinai covenant when Moses received the
commandments and again we emphasized how, by our living up to God’s way,
we become God’s people and God is our God.
And, of course, the commandments
were brought to their full realization, full revelation, in Jesus.
That’s the guide, or, I should say, he is the guide of how we are to live
if we are to be God’s people. And it is important and helpful to
remind ourselves of this, this week, because, as I mentioned before Mass,
next Sunday we will be celebrating the sacrament of reconciliation, a time
when we can be healed of any of the failures that we have experienced in
trying to live up to our covenant to be God’s people, following as faithfully
as possible, the way of Jesus, which is the way of love.
And the lessons today,
as we listen to them carefully, instruct us, I think, in a very helpful
way about sin, about healing and forgiveness and especially, about how
God is always waiting to be gracious to us, to forgive us to heal us.
But sin is something
very real, and it has devastating consequences. That first lesson
today, which is kind of a summary of God’s chosen people, reminded us of
how the people were (as the chronicler writes) exceedingly unfaithful,
following the disgusting example of the nations around them and so they
defiled the house which God had made holy.
And the chronicler points
out how their sinfulness was aggravated, made worse, because God, Yahweh,
the God of your ancestors, continued to send prophets to warn the
people because God had compassion on them. But they mocked the messengers
of God, ignored their words and laughed at the prophets. They rejected
God’s word and so devastation came upon them. Their sin had its consequences.
They refused to heed God’s call to reject violence and war so they were
overcome -- taken off into exile for 70 long, dreadful, painful years.
Obviously, it’s a coincidence
but you have to wonder if the coincidence isn’t saying something profound
to us. Because what this writer of the history of the chosen people is
talking about is when the people were carried off into exile, to what he
calls Babylon. But it is, in fact, the country of Iraq where we are
waging war right now. And isn’t it possible that people like Pope John
Paul II -- who has been speaking out against this war so consistently for
over 12 years actually -- and all the leaders of the Christian religions
throughout the world who are rejecting this war -- and the millions of
people on the streets throughout the world saying, “No!” -- isn’t
that like God sending messengers to us? And we are laughing at them,
disdaining them, rejecting them and choosing violence regardless of what
God says, especially what God says through Jesus.
I don’t know if you would
catch it immediately, but when Jesus says in the Gospel, about being lifted
up:
“The Son of Man, like the serpent in
the desert must be lifted up and that’s how salvation, the saving power
of God’s love will come.”
Jesus is speaking about being lifted up on the cross,
which is what we proclaim in our Eucharistic Prayer as the everlasting
sign of God’s covenant of love.
Jesus, pouring forth
love upon us, rejecting violence, being willing to accept suffering rather
than inflicting it, being willing to be killed rather than to kill, pouring
forth love -- that’s the sign -- that’s Jesus. And that is the message
that Jesus gives to us that the only way to peace is through love -- not
through war, not through killing.
In the Gospel also, Jesus
makes it so clear this is how the judgment happens. It isn’t that
God stands before us and condemns us. No, it is that light has come
into the world; Jesus is the light that has come into the world, but people
love darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.
So, it is a choice that
we make -- whether we accept the light that Jesus is to us or reject that
light. That’s how sin comes into the world, and that is how we are
judged on that simple reality. The message is proclaimed through Jesus.
We can accept it or reject it.
But the consequences
are made so devastatingly clear as we reflect again on what happened to
God’s chosen people when they rejected the messages and the prophets, when
they rejected the light that God was in their midst.
And yet, even as we make
real the possibilities of sin and the consequences of sin, we must also
reflect today on how God is always waiting to be gracious to us.
Those are words proclaimed by the prophet Isaiah, but they are reinforced
today in the first lesson when, after the devastation and failure that
happened because of the people’s rejection of God’s ways, God still reached
out in love. At the end of that first reading we hear how God sent someone
to free the people, to let them go, to restore them to their place in the
chosen land, the holy land -- the place given them by God.
And, in the letter of
Paul to the Church at Ephesus, especially, we are reminded as Paul says;
“God is rich in Mercy.” God reveals immense love and gives us life with
Christ after being dead through our sins.
He goes on to tell us:
“By the grace of God, you are healed through faith and this does not come
from you but it is God’s gift.” It is not the result of your works,
so you are not to feel proud. What we are is God’s handiwork, as
Paul says, created in Jesus to carry out the works produced by God in Jesus.
And so God is inviting
us; God’s mercy is ready to be poured forth upon us. God is asking
us to be open about our sinfulness, to acknowledge it, to be ready for
God to heal us.
Some time ago, Henri
Nouwen wrote a book called “The Living Reminder” and in the introduction
to that book he tells a story that I think is very important for us to
reflect upon today because it reminds us of how sin can destroy us, can
even destroy our world, but only if we neglect to acknowledge our sins
and to be ready for God’s healing. He tells us this story about Elie
Wiesel.
“In 1944 all the Jews
of the Hungarian town of Sighet were rounded up and deported to concentration
camps. Elie Wiesel, the now famous novelist was one of them.
He survived the holocaust and 20 years later he returned to see his hometown
again.
What pained him most
was that the people of Sighet had erased the Jews from their memory.
Elie Wiesel writes:
I was not angry with the people of Sighet
… for having driven out their neighbors of yesterday, nor for having denied
them. If I was angry at all it was for having forgotten them.
So quickly, so completely … Jews have been driven not only out of town
but out of time as well.
And then Henri Nouwen
draws a very important conclusion from that story -- a very basic, fundamental
truth about our spiritual life. He says,
This story suggests that to forget our
sins may be an even greater sin than to commit them. Why? Because
what is forgotten cannot be healed and that which cannot be healed easily
becomes the cause of greater evil. In his many books about the Holocaust,
Eli Wiesel does not remind us of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Treblinka to
torture our consciences with heightened guilt feelings, but to allow our
memories to be healed and so to prevent an even worse disaster. An
Auschwitz that is forgotten causes a Hiroshima, and a forgotten Hiroshima
can cause the destruction of our world. By cutting off our past we
paralyze our future: forgetting the evil behind us we evoke the evil in
front of us.
The truth that Henri
Nouwen is proclaiming and dramatizing so well is the truth that if we refuse
to acknowledge our sins and bury them we become the cause of greater evil
and that happens to us on an individual, personal basis but it also happens
to us as a nation.
We must be willing to
acknowledge our sinfulness, bringing them forth before God in humility,
even in a sense of helplessness, saying to God, “I need your help to overcome
my sins.”
If we can do that, if
we are willing to acknowledge our sins, bring them out into the light,
the light who is Jesus, we can be sure that they will be healed, forgiven
and not become the cause of greater evil.
And so, during this week,
I hope that we will look into our hearts, find where we have failed to
live up to our covenant with God, especially the covenant as revealed in
Jesus who is light and who is love and who shows us that love is the only
way to bring peace into our world. Look into our hearts and discover
how we have fallen short and be ready to bring that before God and then
be confident that God will raise us up. God will heal us. God will
totally forgive us and we will be able to live that new life that Jesus
promises in the Gospel. “God so loved the world that God sent Jesus, God’s
son, into this world in order to save it, to heal it, to bring it life,
to bring it peace.”
By acknowledging our
sinfulness, asking God forgiveness and healing we will experience that
power of Jesus alive in us, enabling us to carry out the good works that
God has called us to do, especially the good work of bringing reconciliation
and peace within all our relationships and within our world.
In the name of the Father,
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN. |
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