Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

 Lectionary: 252

When you lift up the Son of Man,
then you will realize that I AM,
and that I do nothing on my own,
but I say only what the Father taught me.
The one who sent me is with me.
He has not left me alone,
because I always do what is pleasing to him."
Because he spoke this way, many came to believe in him.

 A s the synoptic gospels recall the Lord's three predictions of his suffering, the Gospel of John records three predictions of his being lifted up. Only when he is lifted up on the cross do his enemies and disciples see his cryptic words fulfilled. 

That cross which Christians celebrate with joy and gratitude reveals his intense and faithful love of God his Father, as he does only "what is pleasing to him." The satisfaction of the Father and the Son is a pleasure beyond our comprehension, but it challenges us to decide. We must either stand with the Lord and his God as his mother, the beloved disciple stood by him on Calvary.  

"Because he spoke this way, many came to believe in him." 

Or we must abandon him and never speak that Name again.

Unlike many parts of the Old Testament, the entire New Testament is overshadowed and brilliantly illuminated with the apocalyptic. The word means revealing but it has also come to mean dark and threatening. It has a chiaroscuro effect of light and darkness, an effect used in many depictions of the Lord's birth, death, and resurrection. 

It is a word characteristic of the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries as we experience endless wars between nations and civil wars within nations. It is both dreadful and expectant, terrified and eager, like the young couple who await the birth of their first child and yet worry that neither mother nor child might survive the ordeal. Saint Paul spoke of all creation waiting with eager expectation for the appearance of that new generation. 

In 1953, in the wake of the Second World War and the revelations of horror in the death camps of Europe, Arthur C Clark also prophesied Childhood's End when a mysterious generation of children would destroy their own planet Earth. 

Apocalypse demands that everyone take their stand on the right or the left of every proposition, and those who will not choose are assigned to one or the other despite their hesitation, And if you lose you're only losing your life. In his godless philosophy, all human history is useless banality; its only purpose is a conception of X-men. 

With our faith in God's purposes, Christians pray daily, "Lead us not into [that final] temptation, but deliver us from evil." We hope That Day is not yet, but we know it must come. Lent prepares us and urges us to decide aright. 

[BTW -- this is the 5000th post on my homily blog.]