Fifth
Sunday of Lent
Jer. 31: 31 – 34; Ps. 51; Heb. 5: 7 -9; Jn. 12: 20 – 33
All
things pass away. Memory. At an early age, you can enumerate without any
mistake all those people who have not paid their debts to you. However, as you
mature in age, you even forget your own name. Beauty. In your teenage years, as
you pass by the corridor at school, other students would look at you from head
to toe. However, as you advanced into your senior years, when children see you
at a distance, they run away thinking that you are an old wicked witch. And the
thing which easily passes away without us knowing it is TIME. Our complicated
and busy lifestyle diverts our attention on time that in the end, we simply
say, “I ran out of time. I do not have the time anymore. Dumating na ang panahon at wala na akong magagawa.” Memory, beauty,
and time – all things pass away.
For the
first time in the Gospel of John, we hear Jesus declaring that “the hour has
come.” If you read the entire Gospel, from the first until the eleventh
chapter, we hear Jesus or the evangelist saying, “The hour has not yet come.”
However, starting from our text today until his passion, Jesus acknowledges
that the time has come. Jesus’ public ministry of preaching and healing has
come to an end. He is now getting ready to enter into his hour of
glorification. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”
The “hour
of glorification” is not the moment of Jesus’ “graduation.” He will not be
receiving a medal of excellence but a crown of thorns. His glorification is not
about people praising him for his achievements but ungrateful and angry people
mocking at him. The hour has come for Jesus not to stand on the stage of honor
but on Calvary, the place of the Skull, of death and misery. Since this hour is
something dark and dangerous, Jesus, fully human, was troubled. “I am troubled
now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’”
Scott
Peck in his international bestselling book, “The Road Less Travelled,” begins
his work with the sentence – “Life is difficult.” Indeed, he was right. We have
to admit it that life is never a walk around the park. The Book of Ecclesiastes
has reminded us that “there is a time for everything – for life, for death, for
joy, and for sorrow.” The hour for us to undergo pain and suffering will also
arrive in our lives. It is simply irresistible. Human as we are, we have a lot
of responses when the hour has come. Some of us face it squarely while others
simply run away and disappear. Jesus in our Gospel has taught us a very
important attitude when times become rough – “I am troubled now.” In times like
this, we have to humbly accept it before God and others that we are in trouble;
that we are afraid; that we do not know what to do. For in doing so we are not
simply experiencing our truest humanity but also expressing our longing for
divinity, our need for a God who is love.
If we
fast forward our Gospel, we know that even if Jesus was troubled, he embraced
his “hour of glorification” by taking up his cross, carrying it up along the
streets of Jerusalem, and eventually die hanging on his cross.
Both
our first and second readings today give us an insight on why Jesus faced and
experienced his “hour.”
In our
second reading, the letter to the Hebrews tells us that “Son though he was, he
learned obedience from what he suffered.” His passion and death was not a show
of cowardice and tragedy. It was a carrying out of the Father’s will so that in
the end, he will become “the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”
Such
obedience of Christ on the cross is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Jeremiah
in our first reading today. The days will come when the Lord “will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel and the house of Judah… when the Lord will forgive
their evildoing and remember their sin no more.” Through the death of Jesus Christ,
God entered into a new covenant with us where there is forgiveness and mercy.
In our
life, when we are in the midst of “necessary suffering,” our invitation is to see
it not as a punishment of God but an obedience to his plan in our lives so that
we will be led to a new horizon, a better understanding of life. As they say
that only those who have gone through the evening of their lives can appreciate
the beauty of the morning. All that we need to do is to trust in his love and
mercy.
As we
draw near into the saving paschal mystery of Christ, let us ask the Lord to
grant us the faith which takes away the doubt in our minds; the hope which
holds on despite the pain; and the love which gives us a new horizon, a new
life with God who is love so that when we will face our “final curtain” we will
humbly bow in joy and humility before God and others. Amen!
NB. Photo taken from wall.alphacoders.com
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