EASTER SUNDAY OF THE RESURRECTION

Going into my local supermarket on Boxing Day I couldn’t help but notice that  there were Hot Cross Buns on the shelves, then the chocolate bunnies and eggs appeared so, it must Easter! Not really, as we know. As with most Feasts of the Church the secular world not only misuses them but misunderstands them as well. For most people in our country the Festivals have become associated with an abundance of chocolate things, and not with what we are actually celebrating, how the Love of God the Father in Christ Jesus His Son conquers all in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Two images should be in our minds and hearts at Easter: the Cross and the Empty Tomb. Jesus could not walk out of the Tomb on the first Easter Day unless He had been killed on Good Friday. And He was killed in the most horrible way, for the Romans had devised Crucifixion to degrade, to humiliate, to punish and eventually kill the Victim. This is the part of the Easter Mystery that Easter Bunnies, Easter Eggs and fluffy little chicks never acknowledges. We do have an uphill task at Easter. Most people seem to acknowledge that Jesus was a good man, even that He died, but when we start to talk about Him not staying dead but rather Him being Resurrected, for non-Christians, problems arise. So, what should we do?

It has been suggested that if we would just drop the resurrection bit and concentrate instead on the wonderful teaching of Jesus and His example of generosity, compassion and love then everybody would find Christianity much more believable.  Yet the trouble would then be that this simply wouldn’t be Christianity at all.

The faith of Christians depends on the Resurrection from the dead of Jesus, and always has done, right from the first Easter Day when the Risen Lord Jesus greeted Mary Magdalene in the Garden.

 After the crucifixion, the body of Jesus was taken down from the cross by some of His friends and put in a rock tomb closed with a heavy stone. Yet, when the women came to anoint His dead body on the third day after His death, His tomb was found to be empty; and there is more. He was seen by His followers alive, not a ghost, not a zombie, but a REAL LIVING MAN; they met Him, saw Him, talked with Him, touched Him, ate with Him.

So certain was their belief that nothing could make them recant it. Not ridicule, nor torture, nor even death itself. They couldn’t do it because they were absolutely convinced that it had happened. Plenty of clever and powerful people at the time of the Resurrection had a personal stake in proving the disciples wrong. It shouldn’t have been difficult to prove that a dead man had stayed dead, especially when you have at your disposal the resources of the greatest empire at that time in history. Yet they didn’t do it because it couldn’t be done.

Today billions of people around the world believe and respect the witness of those first disciples of Jesus: Mary Magdalene, John and Peter, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Doubting Thomas who doubted no more, St. Paul on the Road to Damascus. These apostles and disciples saw the Risen Lord Jesus and knew Him to be alive. So today men and women of all ages believe that Jesus is Risen from the dead, and because of this faith their own lives have been transformed by a relationship with Jesus – a relationship that wouldn’t make sense if He were dead! Ultimately, we Christians don’t put our faith in a dead hero from the past, but in someone who is alive and active in our own lives and in the world.  

This past week,  on social media there was a photo of a McDonald’s that had painted across their front window the Tomb, the stone rolled away and the words “Christ is risen — Alleluia!” Not a bunny or chick in sight! There is hope indeed, but we all must get in the act. Yes, we get into the greeting struggle. “Happy Holiday” can and does cover the days of observance of many religions.

But “Happy Easter” is ours — even Christians who are not in the pews on Easter may still have some Easter spirit in their bones. Let us remember that in Scripture there are no mentions of the Easter Bunny and there are no chicks. Easter eggs we can allow; they are the exception because the egg is a symbol of new life! Christ is Risen — Alleluia should be in our hearts and on our lips. Alleluia.

 

HOLY SATURDAY MORNING

“Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep…”

So begins an ancient homily for Holy Saturday. The text dates to the 4th century and was written in Greek; the author is unknown. In it he describes Christ’s descent to the dead, where he grasps Adam and Eve and frees them from sorrow:
“He (Christ) took [Adam] by the hand and raised him up, saying: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light… I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in my and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.’”

We stand in the middle of the great Triduum, the three great days of our Lord’s work. These three days are the holiest of days.

What happened on these days long ago are the only events that ever truly changed the world. And today we find ourselves living once again in the Day of Silence.

Living on the boundary between Good Friday and Holy Easter, we find ourselves stopped for a moment, to tread water with Christ in his being-dead for us. Today we are stopped in our tracks by the narrative of death and burial. On Holy Saturday, God proves that there is no abyss of sin and godlessness that he cannot descend into. The depths of God’s love run every bit as deep as the depths of sin and death which we unleash upon the world. And tomorrow we will learn that the depths of God’s love run infinitely deeper than the abyss of sin…but we’re not there yet.

When we look at the God of Holy Saturday, the Trinitarian, cruciform God and ask ourselves how we might possibly image this kind of love, we find ourselves drawn into God’s loving descent into the depths of our sin for our salvation.

When we say that we, as the church are the image of the Trinity, we are making the daring statement that we are joining in the pattern of Christ, in giving ourselves away, in expending ourselves for other, in putting others before ourselves, in loving others even to the point of death for their sake. This is what the life of the Trinity looks like when translated into the life of the sinful world.

And so, as we seek to live and be the body of Christ, the one who descended into hell for us, his body lying cold in the grave, let us with humility and sobriety remember the horrifically great cost of love. God’s love for us cost him what was most precious to him, his own Son. If we would follow God, if we would be the ikon of his love in the world, the same pattern of self-giving must be true of us. We must, if we seek to follow God, descend into the world of sin and suffering and expend our love on all the unlovely people that we meet. And, as with Christ it may mean our death. But here is the miracle of Holy Saturday: Because Christ has died our death for us, we are never alone in death. “For this reason, Christ died and lived again, that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.”

 

Good Friday

Three times in the New Testament, we see the phrase “before the foundation of the world”. We find it John chapter 17, in the Letter to the Ephesians, and in the First Letter of Peter. In each instance, it means the same thing: that God chose to be incarnate in Jesus before there was any creation. In fact, it means that God’s intention to become incarnate in Jesus was the reason for creation.

That all sounds fine, until you realise what else the phrase means but doesn’t actually say — that Jesus couldn’t have come to fix the results of the fall, because God’s decision to become incarnate in Jesus was made before there ever was a fall. So, all those theories that make out Jesus had to die in order to fix the problem of evil, sin, and death, they miss the crucial revelation made three times in the New Testament that that wasn’t why Jesus came. Jesus came to be with us in time so that we could be with him forever.

Remember the short introduction to the foot washing scene during the Last Supper in John’s gospel: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1). That’s what happens on the cross. Jesus loves us to the end. The fact that Jesus didn’t come to die to fix the sin problem doesn’t make the cross less important. It makes it more important. Look at it this way. God creates the world to be with us in Christ. God prepares to bring the world finally to an end and to be with us forever. The whole story is about being with — beginning, middle, and end.

But here’s the crucial moment in the story. God becomes incarnate in Jesus and dwells among us. Jesus meets us in our fragility, our folly, and our fecklessness. He is Immanuel, “God with us”. Then suddenly he’s surrounded, arrested, assaulted, condemned, crucified. Now’s the moment. If he escapes to the Father now — if he can’t hack it and, because of physical pain or total humiliation or the unthinkability of death, he gets swooped up by angels — then he has demolished and discredited the whole story: the whole reason for creation, the whole destiny of eternity together, the whole purpose of the incarnation. If Jesus can’t stay on the cross, even in the face of being abandoned by the Father, the whole initiative to be with us now and always goes up in smoke.

The cross is the ultimate test of whether God is serious about us. And what it shows in the face of agony, desertion, abandonment, and isolation, is that God is so serious about being with us that God is willing to jeopardise being with God. “No more we doubt thee, glorious Prince of life”, says the great Easter hymn Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son — Jesus is so committed to being with us that he endures separation from the Father. And the Father is so committed to Jesus being with us that he endures not being with Jesus. And in the great mystery of being-with, the Spirit remains with the Father and the Son. And two days later, the Spirit reunites the Father with the Son and God with us in the resurrection.

Look at that. No fancy atonement theory that distorts God and goes against the true reason for creation and incarnation. No human-centric story that’s all about Jesus fixing our problem. Just God; just God being with us; just God being with us whatever happens; just God being with us into, through and beyond Jesus’s death and ours. Just God being with us forever. That’s the gospel. That’s the story that reaches its climax on Palm Sunday.

Recall the words of the hymn “Be Thou My Vision”: Heart of my own heart, whatever befall. That’s what the cross means. That’s what the incarnation means. That’s what Holy Week means. From the foundation of the world. From the dying Jesus. And forever. God is singing to us: Whatever befall. I am with you always. Forever.

 

Holy Thursday

Holy Thursday is the day when the Church recalls the Last Supper of our Lord, the event in the life of Jesus which forms the basis for the sacrament of the Eucharist.

One of the key elements in the theology of the Eucharist is captured in the Greek word “anamnesis,” which means remembrance.” Anamnesis comes from the words that Jesus spoke at the Last Supper: “Do this in memory of me” (Luke 22:19). We also see this being emphasized in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. We can see that the early Church clearly recalled that when Jesus blessed the bread and the wine and shared them with his disciples, he had asked them to do it in order to remember him. It is precisely because of this commandment of Jesus that we celebrate the Eucharist.

 This idea of remembering goes back to the Passover. In the first Reading, we read about Moses instituting the first Passover among the people of Israel who were in bondage in Egypt. It was a tradition that was to be passed on and followed by all generations to mark the night of their escape from slavery.  

Jesus, being a good Jew who would have certainly heard this story from his parents as a child, also remembered and celebrated this great thanksgiving for God’s salvation on the night of his arrest. Using the bread and wine as symbols of sacrifice and suffering, on his last supper before he was killed, he helped his disciples to trust   even when sin, evil, and death seemed to triumph.

 The Passover, which was remembered during the Last Supper, became a reality on Easter Day, even though they had difficulty accepting and believing it. This is why the followers of Jesus took seriously his commandment to remember(anamnesis) him as they broke the bread and shared the cup. It is also why we believe that Christ is present with us in the bread and the wine. On Holy Thursday, we place the host at an altar of repose, which reminds us of the garden of Gethsemane. We watch and pray because we believe that the presence of Christ is as real today as it was two thousand years ago.

Anamnesis  is to remember and relive past events in a way that matters to us in the present.   In other words, it is a conscious recognition of the presence and application of the past to transform the world in the present. This means that Eucharist is more than blessing the bread and wine. It is more than breaking the bread and sharing the cup as Jesus did.  

While other gospel writers and Paul remembered Jesus blessing the bread and the wine and proclaiming that the bread was his body and the wine was his blood, the author of the fourth gospel, John, notices and writes about something different and deeper. He recalls that, during the supper, Jesus had done something unthinkable. He humbled himself like a lowly servant  and washed the feet of his disciples, including the one who was going to betray him, reminding them of the importance of humility and love.

 Thus, John seems to tell us that perhaps the most important aspect of the Last Supper which we remember and celebrate on Holy Thursday,  is love loving one another as Christ has loved us, self-sacrificing, self-emptying, and self-giving love.  It is a love that even bends down and washes the feet of those who may hate us. Love is exactly what Christ wants us to do! In fact, this is what the word Maundy the older name for Holy Thursday stands for; the Latin word “mandatum” means “commandment.” On this night, Jesus gave a new commandment to his disciples: to love one another. This means, as important as the bread and the wine are to the Eucharist, as necessary as our traditions and rituals of the Triduum are, we cannot overlook the crucial significance of love. In fact, without love, God’s love for the world that brings us together, and our love for one another, there is not and can be no meaningful celebration of the Eucharist.

Often,   we end up forgetting the most important reason and objective for Maundy Thursday, which is to love one another. This is why,  we practice the tradition of foot washing, to remind ourselves to love one another as God has loved us. As we break the bread and share the cup, as we experience or witness the foot washing, we are reminded to go beyond the many barriers that divide us, transcend the hate that often surrounds us, and serve our fellow sisters and brothers in love.

As we remember this Last Supper and the humble act of our Lord, and as we gather at the Lord’s Altar to receive his body and blood,  may we remember to follow his command to love one another.

 

PALM SUNDAY

When evening came he arrived with the Twelve. And while they were at table eating, Jesus said,

  ✠ I tell you solemnly, one of you is about to betray me, one of you eating with me.

  N. They were distressed and asked him, one after another,

  C. Not I, surely?

“Not I surely?” What could more blatantly expose the guilty consciences of the disciples as they shared the Passover meal with Jesus? NIV translates it: “Surely you don’t mean me?”

The location was an upper room in Jerusalem. There, the dangers of their mission must have begun to dawn. Previously, they had been an insignificant local group. Now, they are in the holy city, site of the central Roman administration, residence of the Roman governor, abode of the chief priests and elders — Jesus’s implacable enemies.

It is hardly surprising that the disciples ask, “Not I surely?” The fact that they ask at all hints that they have realised the possible consequences of their friend’s challenge to the religious and imperial authorities. Perhaps they already thought of deserting him, pictured themselves quietly melting into the faceless crowd. After all, not many hours later, they did exactly that (14.50).

The term, “the Son of Man” occurs four times in this passage (14.21 [twice], 41, 62),  I suggest that, if the article “the” is present (“the Son of Man”), it is safe to say that Jesus is speaking about himself.  The term embraces two ideas: first, that by being human he is subject to death; and, second, that, through his death and beyond it, God will vindicate him.  

Palm Sunday is a good time to investigate what Jesus means by calling himself the Son of Man; for this is when the meaning of Jesus’s life as a human individual shades into what we sometimes call the “Christ-event” — a shift, in other words, between Jesus, son of Joseph, and Christ, the eternal Word. Only when this shift takes place can we begin to ask one of the deep questions of Passiontide: what does Jesus’s suffering and death say about him; and how can it speak to us, beyond what marks the suffering or death of any other human being?

Our answer comes with the fulfilment of the story of “the Son of Man”. Way back in Mark’s Gospel, people had responded to Jesus’s teaching by asking one another, “Where did this man get all this?” (6.2). They have seen nothing in his background, upbringing, education, or work life to make him as different. And yet, after his baptism, his life seems to burst its ordinary human bounds. He calls, communicates, and cures. He guides, challenges, and inspires, in ways that are utterly overwhelming. Jesus teaches about God like one who knows him fully and is at home in his presence.

 The story is being told once again. Forget for a moment that you know the ending.  Love comes to us today riding on a donkey. Let us greet him with palms and songs. And then let us once again journey with him from death into life.

The spiritual and emotional feeling builds towards Maundy Thursday, right up to the moment when the disciples desert Jesus and flee.

Then, we wait: first, for the crucifixion to happen; then, for it to end. Finally, we wait for the tomb in which he was laid to be found empty, so that death can bring us to life once more, beside our friend and brother: beside the Son of Man.

Finally,  Holy Week is the greatest and most important week in the Christian year. I invite you to enter into this week as fully as you can, by making time to worship, and to make this a sacred time in which we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes again.

Over the next few days, we do not just recall the death of Christ as an important or note-worthy event external to us. Rather, we encounter the Risen Lord in our midst through the liturgy of the church and enter into the mystery of his Cross through our keeping together of this sacred time

May we encounter the holy this week, and may we find our tired hope refreshed.

 

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT B (Passion Sunday)

Our readings today are filled with anticipation. The days are coming, Jeremiah prophesies in today’s First Reading. The hour has come, Jesus says in the Gospel. The new covenant that God promised to Jeremiah is made in the “hour” of Jesus—in His Death, Resurrection, and Ascension to the Father’s right hand.

Firstly we gain a glimpse of Jesus reacting with two of his disciples. Philip and Andrew came to tell him that some Greeks had arrived asking to see him. Jesus  took the opportunity  to teach – to lay out what his followers needed to understand.  

His reply to Phillip and Andrew indicated his readiness for what would be his final days. He said that it was time for him to reveal what all humankind would see about him and his role in the divine drama. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

This must have excited his disciples and the Greeks. Having recently experienced Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, perhaps they thought he would work even greater wonders and bring an end to their difficulties in life. Or, maybe,   they thought he meant it was time for him to prevail over all the world’s kingdoms. Any such euphoria, however, would have been short-lived. It was   a different kind of conquest that Jesus had in mind – the conquest of the cross.

Jesus immediately began to lay out the hard truth of what lay ahead. In a similar way, as we worship one week away from Palm Sunday, our gospel reading lets us see what lies ahead for us in making the Holy Week journey.

Jesus used a parable,  “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” A seed, by itself, is only a small piece of matter.  But if it is buried and dies beyond its present condition, it can release all that is contained within – the very nature and substance of a whole stalk of ripened wheat.

His own death and resurrection would be the vehicle through which not only his disciples but all humankind, could truly see what Jesus was all about. It was by dying that the power of God contained in Jesus would be fully released. By “glorified,” Jesus meant crucified. Jesus was saying that only by his death could true life come. Just as a grain of wheat, remaining unfruitful in the protective security of a barn, can only release its power by being buried and dying to what it has been.

Making sure there would be no mistake Jesus added this to the parable: “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” So, what was true for Jesus, he said, was also true for his followers. Those who would truly see him would know that only by their deaths to the values of the world could they gain true life. He said, “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour.”

Often in the course of human experiences – those of past centuries as well as current times – this truth has proved itself out . This is summed up in a well-known phrase by Tertullian, a Christian writer in the first century: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

Often, people become of real use to God by burying their own goals and desires. Think about the saints.  They are the ones who put aside personal safety and security for the sake of others. They abandon gain and the advancement of personal need to meet the needs of others.  They give themselves away to God and to others.

In today’s gospel, Jesus lets us see an initial view of him as the prototype – the perfect example – of the kind of risk-filled living that love of God requires.  Only by spending our lives, he says, can we keep our true lives. Jesus   calls us to see him – to see his vision – a new view of life, a life of meaning and of glory.

  In the encounter in today’s gospel, Jesus taught that only dying to self can bring forth the kind of redeemed life God has in store for us; only by spending life can we retain it. Only in this context can we do what the Greeks hoped to do – see Jesus for what he is for the world.   Only in this way can we see him for what he really is – the living image of God.

As we move  toward Holy Week, we come as the Greeks before the Lord – asking to see Jesus – to discover what he is all about. As we witness the ultimate example that he provides, we can follow him into a life of true meaning and become transformed by what we see.

 

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT B

The Sunday readings in Lent have been showing us the high points of salvation history—God’s covenant with creation in the time of Noah; His promises to Abraham; the law He gave to Israel at Sinai. In today’s First Reading, we hear of the destruction of the kingdom established by God’s final Old Testament covenant—the covenant with David. His chosen people abandoned the law He gave them. For their sins, the temple was destroyed, and they were exiled in Babylon. We hear their sorrow and repentance in the exile lament we hear in today’s Psalm.

Several verses before today’s Gospel begins, we learn that Nicodemus comes to see Jesus at night. Coming on his own time, after a full day’s work, demonstrates that Nicodemus is motivated by a genuine desire to learn from him. The Nicodemus we meet in today’s Gospel is eager student visiting a teacher to check for understanding.

We don’t always see God’s presence clearly labelled in the world around us. But, if we begin to pay attention, every once in a while, we will notice God’s presence nonetheless—in transforming hearts, changing minds, and bending wills.

That is precisely what Jesus is inviting Nicodemus to do: start paying attention to the presence of God in his life. That’s an especially important lesson for Nicodemus to learn because Jesus won’t always be with him. At least, not in the same sense that he is on this night.

Jesus hints at this reality in the first verse of the portion of the passage we hear this morning. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

As 21st-century Christians, we hear Jesus’ words in full knowledge of his death and resurrection. We can easily draw a parallel between the serpent being lifted up in the wilderness, and Jesus being lifted up on the cross.

Nicodemus, on the other hand, doesn’t know yet what’s going to happen to Jesus. But when he does find out, if he remembers this conversation with Jesus, he will learn for the first time the answer to his question.

“How can somebody be born from above?” Because Jesus died and rose again.

Jesus himself is the answer to Nicodemus’ important question. That’s what Jesus is trying to teach him. But Nicodemus will not—and cannot—completely understand this until he develops a relationship with Jesus. For that matter, neither can we.

Developing a relationship with Jesus doesn’t happen overnight. There is no simple how-to guide for the process, no matter what anyone says. It requires taking time to pay attention to Jesus, the Risen Christ, and his presence in our lives.

That just so happens to be a central task of the Lenten season.

 During Lent, Christians tend to focus on the self-denial part of that, but the rest is important, too. If we use the remaining days of Lent to lean into a period of self-examination, prayer, and scriptural meditation, then we will be walking with Nicodemus into a deeper relationship with our risen and living Lord.

Try, for instance, reading through the rest of John’s gospel account. You will get a sense of Nicodemus’s own journey with Jesus, and it just might inform your own.

In chapter seven, when others are plotting to arrest Jesus, Nicodemus speaks in his defence, even after several have turned against him. And in chapter 19, Nicodemus even joins Joseph of Arimathea to prepare Jesus’ body for burial after it’s taken down from the cross.

When he helped lay Jesus in the tomb that day, Nicodemus didn’t know what would happen in just two days’ time. We do. That’s all the more reason for us to be on the lookout for Jesus’ presence in our lives. If we do that, then we can—right alongside Nicodemus—experience the joy of that beautiful Sunday morning all over again, even as if for the very first time.

 

THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT B

Jesus does not come to destroy the temple, but to fulfill it  to reveal its true purpose in God’s saving plan. He is the Lord the prophets said would come—to purify the temple, banish the merchants, and make it a house of prayer for all peoples.

For Jesus, it is the first Passover of his public ministry and his first known visit to Jerusalem as a grown man.       

Why did Jesus become so angry when he saw his father’s house being made into a marketplace? The Old Testament Reading gives us many clues to the answer. Idolatry of any kind was forbidden by God. The money changers had the following purpose: taxes had to be paid to the Roman overlords, but the Roman money carried the image of Caesar on it. The High Priests, considering this image idolatry, had ordered that the money paid in taxes should be converted to the shekel in order to be acceptable for Temple business. In that exchange, a great profit went into the coffers of these same priests. Jesus knew that this was both profanity of the Temple and exploitation of the poor.  

Jesus knew that his acts in the courtyard of the Temple would bring him in direct conflict with the high priests. This early in his ministry he is very popular with the people, so the priests don’t dare touch him. As his interpretation of who God is and what God demands of us, he becomes a stumbling block to the high priests, and the people, not getting the signs that they demand, agree to his death.  

In a few years St. Paul will articulate it very clearly to the Corinthians. The Jews were scandalized by Jesus’, by his claim to know the mind of his father, by his willingness to meet his death without any retaliation or violence. To the Gentiles, with whom Paul is sharing what he learned from Christ, all this is foolishness. It goes against their own admiration for wisdom and philosophy, even for courage in battle. St. Paul summarizes the reaction to the acts of Jesus: “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

In today’s gospel story, St. John shows the activity of Jesus in all its glory. The leaders of the Jews had fooled the people with a piety that had become idolatry and had allowed physical structures to take the place of a God who demanded, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Our culture has forgotten this command also, and so many signs or symbols have been turned into idols

We need Jesus’ courage to cleanse the temples of idolatry. We long for his kind of integrity that dares to call out the oppressors, no matter who they are. We pray for the power to overthrow the tables of the moneychangers who cheat the poor and the voiceless. In St. Paul’s words, we too must “proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”  

As we approach Holy Week, we need the love and the passion that can sustain us. We will be laughed at when we too resist the culture of the day, but we will remember with St. Paul that, “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Let us be aware, more than ever during this season of Lent, that the power of God goes with us. Jesus’ body—destroyed on the Cross and raised up three days later—is the new and true sanctuary the Spirit of grace that makes each of us a temple   and together builds us into a dwelling place of God.

In the Eucharist  we  offer praise as our sacrifice. This means imitating Christ—offering our bodies—all our intentions and actions in every circumstance, for the love of God and the love of others