[stephenkhoo]

25 March, 2012, 5th Sunday of Lent


THE PASSIONATE LOVE OF GOD IN CHRIST AND HIS DEATH RECONCILES US WITH GOD AND MAN

SCRIPTURE READINGS: JER 31:31-34; HEB 5:7-9; JN 12::20-30

Today’s gospel speaks of the imminent passion of Jesus. It would be at this hour that Christ would be revealed as the Universal Saviour of the World and of humanity. It would be at this hour when humankind is technically saved.

But why does it take the death of Jesus to save us? Why must Jesus die in order to save us? Couldn’t God find an easier way to save humankind? Must God desire the death of His Son to save us? Certainly not! Because if we think that it is the death of His Son that is a precondition for the Father’s forgiveness, then such a God would be too monstrous even to think about. Yes, we can maintain that Jesus’ death is not absolutely necessary to save us. But this is in no way tantamount to saying that His death is redundant and has nothing to do with our salvation.

On the contrary, we must say that it is His death (and resurrection) that saved us, as has always been proclaimed in scripture and theology. While we cannot say that because Jesus died and therefore God saves us, we must hold that Jesus died because God loves us. The death of Jesus is the concrete and historical way in which God shows us His unconditional and forgiving love for us. Although the death of Jesus is not absolutely necessary for us to be saved, yet God’s passionate love led Him to demonstrate His love in an unsurpassable and definitive manner, by becoming man in Jesus and to die on the cross. This precisely is the theme of today’s mass: God’s passionate love for us reconciles us by becoming man and then by dying for us as an expression of His love and solidarity with us.

To understand why the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus is necessary for our salvation, we must situate His paschal mystery in the context of the Covenant which God had intended for His people, the covenant as promised by Jeremiah.

God has always been patient in His love for us. When man turned against God, He continued to send His prophets to invite us to return to Him to share in His divine life of love. And God demonstrated this love by being personally involved in the history ofIsrael. He worked miracles and wonders when He rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and when He led them through the desert. Knowing how weak man is, God even gave to Moses the Ten Commandments and established with the Israelites the so-called Mosaic Covenant so that they could, with the help of the commandments, live a life of love and union among themselves, with strangers and most of all, with God. In this way, they will reflect the life of God Himself, the life of love and communion. Unfortunately, the history ofIsraelshows repeatedly that they failed to keep the covenantal relationship. Yes, as God lamented through Jeremiah, “They broke that covenant of mine!”

Within this context, we can understand the new covenant prophesied by Jeremiah. Why is a new covenant necessary? The truth is that in spite of the fact that God has shown His immense love in the history of Israel and in the Mosaic Covenant, the people of Israel still remained selfish and individualistic because somehow they were still not deeply touched by God’s love. Miracles and wonders, spectacular they might be, still remain outside of man. This is more so especially with regard to the written laws of the Ten Commandments, which were carved in stone. All these will always remain external to the hearts and minds of man.

Today, the Church wants to proclaim that this new covenant promised by Jeremiah is now fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus’ life, passion and death is the way to convince us that God loves us and wants us to be in union with Him. Yes, God loves us so passionately that He would assume our humanity. In order to reveal His Father’s nature as fidelity in love, Jesus would even give His life for us by being lifted up on the cross for our reconciliation. For on this cross, Jesus said, “… I shall draw all men to myself.” It is His death on the cross that will exude a magnetic power, a power that the written laws could not effect in bringing men to Him and to His Father. But how does Jesus’ death on the cross draw all men to Him and to His Father?

Firstly, the passion of Jesus reveals that the cause of all our sufferings is disobedience to God’s will and His commands. But we must be careful not to imagine His will as some arbitrary external command or law imposed upon us. Rather, this disobedience is the failure to be faithful to ourselves, to be what God created us to be, which is to live in love and unity. This is the real intention and objective of the Covenant and the commandments. By rejecting the commandments, and therefore the call to be in communion with God and with our fellow human beings, we bring about our alienation from God and others. Secondly, His death on the cross demonstrates to us the consequences of rejecting the plan of God. In the cross, God in Jesus identifies Himself with our sinfulness and with our sufferings. Yes, Jesus has undergone the sufferings that we go through. Jesus certainly experienced for Himself the full extent of what ignorance, selfishness, fears, hatred and pride can do. Through His innocent suffering, Jesus certainly reveals to us that it is the evil and selfishness in man’s heart that causes all these sufferings. The cross reveals what sin; what destruction and harm, selfishness, fear, pride and anger can do to us and to others. As Jesus tells us in the gospel, “anyone who loves his life loses it.”

Thirdly, the passion of Jesus shows us the way out of our problems and misery. The key, according to Jesus, lies in death unto self in obedience and fidelity to the covenant of love that God has always meant for us. This fidelity to love is expressed by Jesus who said that “Unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest. Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for the eternal life.” Yes, it is our death to self, to our ego, to our fears and to our pride that can free us from our sinful alienation from others. Jesus, by His death, demonstrated that the only way to conquer sin, all evils and alienation symbolized by death, is by dying to death, which is to die to self.

Of course, dying to self is not an easy thing. The scriptures today make it clear that Jesus was no super-human. Today’s scripture texts show that Jesus as a man was frightened in the face of death. He was no stoic. He did not run frantically to embrace the cross. On the contrary, He wanted to run away from the cross. However, Jesus knew that He was called to reveal the unconditional love of the Father to us. His whole mission was to demonstrate in person that God is merciful and that His love is unconditional. It would be going against His very nature and the Father’s will to run away from that hour of passion.

Thus, for us to go through the passion, one thing is absolutely necessary. If we truly want to live the life of God, that life of unconditional love, then we need to be in union with Him. And what better way to do so than to be in prayer? Like Jesus, we too must also offer up “prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears.” Hebrews remind us that only God has the power to save us out of death. And the Father will also respond to us as He did to Jesus’ cry when He assured Him by saying, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” Yes, the Father promised His divine assistance to Jesus that He would be able to fulfill His mission of being the Father’s emissary of love in person so that His name will be glorified forever and so that no one will ever doubt that God is love.

In this way, in dying to ourselves and in being in union with others and with God, we share in the divine life of God. Thus, the new covenant promised to Jeremiah is fulfilled because to be able to live the divine life of God in love means that we know God deep in our hearts and that others too will see us as the expression of God’s love in person. In living that life of love, we share the heart of God. In this sense the new law of love is written in our hearts.