Homily for Quinquagesima - 2008

Isaiah 35:3-7 / 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 / Luke 18:31-43

Jesus tells the Twelve of His impending sufferings. "We are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise."

St. Luke underscores three times how this made absolutely no sense to them. He writes: "They understood none of these things. The saying was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said." Thus the Holy Spirit teaches us that no one can begin to grasp the glorious meaning of the Passion, Cross, and Resurrection of our Lord without His illumination, without the Spirit opening up the depths of the Cross and the triumph of the Crucified.

To get it, I think we need to go back and recall an earlier word. Remember how He had taught before: "But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either."

Human reason stumbles at these words again. Even as you hear them, you raise in your minds all the "yes, well, but…" But what? If we live that way, you think, you fear, you will be taken advantage of. People will see it as an opportunity to abuse you. In fact, you may end up dead. Killed. Surely the words can't mean what they say? Surely He didn't really mean it, did He?

It is the exact same point of stumbling that the disciples tripped over when Jesus spoke about His suffering, His cross, His death AND His resurrection. You see, what Jesus was teaching them, what He tries to teach us, is that such a life, a life where honest-to-God enemies who are out to hurt you and damage you and destroy you, are loved, forgiven, blessed and prayed for - that THAT life is such a life that no death can hold it, that death has no power over it ultimately.

And so He goes to His Cross in the utter confidence that on the other side of the suffering, on the other side of betrayals, the mockery, the spit, the whip, and the nails, is a life that will never end because no pain that He suffered could turn Him from loving, no agony He went through could stop His thirsting for the salvation of the very ones at whose hands He was being tortured.

We're so cowed by suffering and death that we think: "No way." He comes along and says: "Way." I AM the Way, and the Truth, and the LIFE. You will see. I will shatter the hatred and bitterness and anger of this world, its violence and cruelty, by enduring it without ceasing to love. And that is how I will open the way into the Kingdom, for you and for all. I will send forth an embassy of forgiveness, of divine amnesty, for all, a message of my love that has overcome all sin and even the power of death.

Do you see, then, my friends, that what Jesus is reaching us, what He is giving to us and calling us to make our own when He speaks of us having "eternal life" is nothing less than love? HIS kind of love? Love that is stronger than all the hatred and darkness of this age. Love that laughs at death as powerless to harm it. Love that, in the words of the Epistle, "never ends."

If the disciples are the picture of all whose eyes are blinded by the fear of death and the weight of sin, the blind man is the picture of all whose eyes are opened by faith. Certainly our Lord shows His almighty power in opening that man's blind eyes, but look at what the man did with his newly opened eyes! "Immediately he recovered his sight and followed him, glorifying God."

And there you see the goal. Jesus tells the disciples "WE are going up to Jerusalem." He wants you to come with Him into the love that will never cease, to share in His life that cannot and does not come to an end, by sharing in His love - dishing it out to others as richly as He has to you.

Saul was a bit of wolf. Remember how in his zeal for the Lord he was willing to kill, to imprison, to inflict all kinds of suffering. When the Lord Jesus flicks him off his horse and blinds him so that he can begin to see, one of the things he wants his new apostle to see is "how much he must suffer for my name." And so Saul the persecutor became Paul the Persecuted. From wolf to lamb. But it's not his sufferings that are so astonishing, it's how he gets what it means to follow the Lord up to Jerusalem, glorifying God. He writes in Romans 12: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." What good is that he is referring to? The good that is love, patient and kind, not envious or boastful, not arrogant or rude, not insisting on its own way or irritable or resentful, not rejoicing in wrongdoing, but in the truth, bearing all things that comes its way, believing in God's mercy through it all, and so hoping through all circumstances - the love that never ends.

Such is the love that Christ reached you upon Calvary's tree where He bore all your sin - all your raging against Him and insisting on your own loveless way - He bore it and went on loving you and so He is risen in a life that can never end, to become for you the source of eternal salvation.

When He reaches you His love in the bread that is His body, in the chalice that holds His blood, and tells you that it is for your forgiveness, for the wiping out of your sin, He comes to unite you to Himself, so that His life can be your life, so that His love can be your love. You, on your own, will never find the strength to do what Divine Love does - and with your mind it will never make sense. But when once the Holy Spirit opens blind eyes and enlightens darkened minds, you will see and rejoice that you never have to rely on your own strength. You can rely on His, and then you'll join all the blind the Lord has healed across the ages, as you dance up the road with your Jesus to whatever Calvary awaits you - glorifying God for the gift of a life that does not end, because it IS love. Amen.