4th Sunday of Lent year B | Homily for 10th March 2024 I

 

My dear friends today we celebrate the Fourth Sunday of Lent which is called Laetare Sunday. The Latin ‘Laetare’ means Rejoice. Since this Sunday occurs in the middle of Lent, just as Gaudete Sunday is celebrated midway through Advent, Laetare Sunday reminds us that Easter is close at hand. As on Gaudete Sunday, rose-colored vestments may replace violet and flowers may grace the altar. The central theme of today’s readings is that our salvation is the free gift of a merciful God given to us through Jesus.

The first reading is taken from the book of 2nd Chronicles. Now the book of the Chronicles was produced by somebody who lived a couple hundred years after the Israelites returned from the Babylonian exile. For this author, Jerusalem and the temple were built some time ago but yet the expected Messianic rule was not established. The author of Chronicles has reshaped the stories of the past to provide a message of hope for the future. The book of Chronicles ends by pointing forward. It calls God’s people to look back in order to look ahead.

The passage today is from the concluding part of the book. It shows us how the people's infidelities caused them to lose the Temple and their homeland. God’s people were disobeying His commandments and defiling His own Temple. Amid their rebellion, God sent many prophets to Israel to call them to repentance. But they did not listen! Rather, they mocked God’s messengers, revealing the hardness of their hearts. As a result, they suffered the consequences for their sins. The Temple was destroyed, Jerusalem was sacked, and the people were taken into exile in Babylon. Cyrus the King of the Persians then tells the Israelites in exile to return home and rebuild the city and the temple. This salvation brought to them by God, despite their rebellion, was a foreshadowing of the salvation to come in Christ. This reading presents to us the compassion and patience of God. God is willing to use desperate measures, even the heartbreak of his people, to save them and not to hurt them.  

The second reading taken from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, summarizes the beautiful truth of the Gospel in which we rejoice. While we were “dead in our transgressions [i.e. sins]” and could do nothing to save ourselves, God took action and sent Jesus to die on the cross, rise from the dead, and, therefore, offer us salvation. Paul referring to all those who are ‘in Christ’, speaks now of ‘the great love with which God loved us’. He speaks of God’s love in terms of ‘mercy’. The focus is clearly on the mystery of salvation as a gift to sinners. Paul teaches that, although we don’t deserve anything from God on our own merits, God chose to love, save and give life to us - both Jewish and Gentile Christians - because of His great mercy and love. While this reading affirms that we are “saved through faith,” it also makes clear that this faith itself “is the gift of God. Paul emphasizes the saving mercy and graciousness of God as the foundation on which the Christian community is built. The implication for those who follow Christ is that the mercy and graciousness that God has shown to them as members of the Body of Christ should be demonstrated by them in their relationships with others.

The gospel taken from John contains what is perhaps the best-known Bible verse- “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” This verse is part of the passage which contains Nicodemus' visit to Jesus. Jesus in his reply refers to the story in the book of Numbers (Num 21:4-9) which speaks about the people in the wilderness being bitten and killed by serpents when they complained against God and Moses. When the people repented God told Moses to make a serpent of bronze and set it on a pole so that anyone who had been bitten might look at it and live. Just as the serpent was a symbol of God’s mercy and life, Jesus raised up on the cross would be the symbol of eternal life which God offers to those who believe in Him. The Greek word Houtōs - Οὕτως, which is translated as  ‘so’ is also translated as ‘in this way’. The emphasis of the text is not on how much God loved the world, but rather it is about in what way God loved the world.

God loved the world in this way that he gave His Son so that we might live forever with God. The purpose of God’s having sent the Son was to save the world, just as the purpose of commanding Moses to erect a serpent on a pole was to save the people from death. The son came to save, to grant eternal life because God loved the world. As St. Augustine puts it: "God loves each one of us as if there were only one of us to love." On one hand, while we speak about God’s love for us, we also have to face the reality of the human response to God’s love. “the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” (Jn 3:19). Truthfully speaking, there is some darkness in each one of us. In some sense, all of us live in the shadows. Addiction to alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, sexual immorality, environmental irresponsibility, religious fundamentalism and a lack of purpose among people are a few of these shadows and quite often we conveniently choose to close our eyes and pretend that these shadows don't exist.  

As we come closer to Easter, it is important to remember why Jesus came into the world. He did not come to judge but to love. Surely, He knows all about the dark corners of our lives and He wants us to stop hiding our sin in the dark. The light of His forgiveness shines into our lives, brightening up every corner, forgiving every sin, restoring our relationship with God, and renewing our lives. Our response to God should therefore not be one of guilt or fear but of love.

Without Jesus, we stood condemned and deserved eternal separation from God. But in Jesus, we can have eternal life. In what parts of our life is the darkness of sin still lingering around? Jesus wants to fill our whole life with His light, pushing out sin. Will we let Him in? On this Laetare Sunday let us reflect on what brings us joy in life and thank God for those things and let us ask for the grace to love the cross, the symbol of God’s forgiving and merciful love. God’s love is unconditional, universal, forgiving and merciful. Let us try in our small ways to emulate these qualities in our interactions with others during this season of Lent.  May God bless us all.