Fifth Sunday of Lent
“I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the LORD. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.”
This description of the day when a new covenant would be fulfilled, which we’re given by the prophet Jeremiah, is something we are in the midst of right now. Its something we see and have seen, something we’ve already received and something we can share with others.
The law of God has been written upon our hearts, we are His people, and even now, we can enjoy the great gift of God’s forgiveness without price, all through Christ, our Lord. And yet, that day is also something not here yet, something we have yet to enter into. The law on our hearts might be obscured, because we’ve sought and served other gods.
There is much to be taught and much to be learned if all, from the least to the greatest, are to know the Lord and His love for us. And much of man’s sin has yet to be offered to the forgiveness won for us by Christ’s sacrifice, even those of who are only as far away from forgiveness as they are from the confessional.
Clearly, we are not yet there at the temporal completion of God’s work of salvation. We should be neither panicked at the thought of the day of fulfillment, Christ’s glorious return and the universal judgment, nor should we kick back and think, “I’ve got plenty of time to iron out those pesky habit and vices.” We’ve each been given the time we have right now, no more and no less, to learn, to grow, to reform, to turn and re-turn our hearts to God.
Pope Francis, in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, reiterates this urgent call to “all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them; I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day. No one should think that this invitation is not meant for him or her” (EG 3). In this encounter with Christ, we will meet both the God who loves us and the Man who would not hold Himself from the suffering and even death it would cost Him to win each and every one of His lost sheep back.
In the Gospel, it was the arrival of a foreigner, Greeks seeking to meet a Jew, that prompted Christ to remind His apostles of the depths and lengths of divine love and the scope of the salvation His suffering would merit. The glory of God’s plan was accomplished in Christ’s human will and divine will being united perfectly with the will of the Father in filial obedience and through our obedience, our wills united to God’s, we share in that same glorious, divine plan. It is a plan by which one finds eternal life by considering their own life as lost in the service of another.
St. Katherine Drexel, an American example of a life poured out in service of others, give the USCCB’s document on racism its title when she said: “If we wish to serve God and love our neighbor well, we must manifest our joy in the service we render to Him and them. Let us open wide our hearts. It is joy which invites us. Press forward and fear nothing” (Open Wide Our Hearts, p 20).
Families:
Pick one reading from this weekend (available here) and read through it together (before or after Mass)
Ask your children if they have any vocabulary questions. If there is a place name mentioned consider looking it up on a map (google maps is great!) and ask older children to briefly re-tell the story to see if they understood the basics of the message/reading.
Consider learning more about St. Katherine Drexel by watching a video biography. Talk about what you all learned from the video.