Saturday of the Fifth Week of Lent

 Lectionary: 256

But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, "What are we going to do?

In a seminar on preaching, the Dominican professor critiqued my work and said he couldn't follow my progress from one thought to another. Given to intuitive impulses, I often see connections between ideas, images, and adages that none else can make out. He suggested that I insert transitions from one thought to the next so that my listeners might follow my runaway train of thought.

Today's gospel transitions us from Jesus's triumph in Bethany to the Lord's last Passover and his Passion and death. The story is necessarily about behind-the-scenes political events for Saint John's Gospel, keenly aware of the Sacraments and their impact in our real world, must show us how grace and goodness are not welcome in our real world. They might find a place in an illusive best of all possible worlds, but not in ours. 

How is it that anyone could hate one who restores the dead to life? Why should feeding five thousand people in the wilderness arouse animosity? Or rebuking a crowd of street roughs who would stone a defenseless woman? Aren't these purely good and desirable acts? Don't we encourage courage and lionize heroes? Are they not irrefutable proofs that God has visited his people? 

Caiphas explained it: 

So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, “What are we going to do? This man is performing many signs. If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation.”

But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing, nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish.”

It's a brilliant transition for it makes sense not only to the Sanhedrin; it clarifies the matter for us. As Saint John adds, 

He did not say this on his own, but since he was high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.
So from that day on they planned to kill him.

Much of our contemporary "spirituality" is intuitive, and unwilling to make the necessary connections to the real world of politics, the economy, or where people live. It hears spiritual conversations between the trees and birds and worms that more practical persons scoff at. Nor do all intuitive persons see the same the connections; one intuitive cannot necessarily hear the sympathetic vibes another hears so clearly. 

But, as Saint Paul said to Timothy, we do not "promote speculations rather than the plan of God that is to be received by faith." When people dismiss the Truth their signals become like Babel's confusion, utter nonsense to everyone. 

I suspect the conspirators of January 6, 2021 were mostly intuitive persons; they thought the whole nation with its military and police and locked-down securities would see what they saw -- although they could not agree on what they saw -- and rise up with them. 

Our salvation is more real than anything the most intuitive/spiritual person could ever imagine. Although we work for justice and apply mercy, we cannot see the transition from this world to God's Kingdom. It will be both political and economic, social and personal. It will make sense of, and fulfill, the worst moments of human life, even the killing of God's Son: 

...as it is written:
“What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard,
and what has not entered the human heart,
what God has prepared for those who love him,”
this God has revealed to us through the Spirit. (1 Cor 2:9 and Is 64:3)