A Homily for Passion Sunday

​+ Throughout Lent the Sacred Liturgy, most particularly through her ancient selection of some of the most powerful epistles and Gospel passages of the liturgical year, has immersed us in the contemplation of the blunt realities of the conflict between life and death, of sin and justice, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, insistently calling us to repentance and that conversion of life which is necessary for each of us in the light of the truth of God they proclaim. (It is worth saying again: the texts of the Lenten liturgy are more than enough spiritual reading or lectio divina for a lifetime: if their mysteries penetrate us and inform our daily living out of our vocation, we cannot go far wrong.)
 
In more recent days the Church, through her sacred rites, has plunged us into the controversial, indeed the fundamental, question of “Who is Jesus of Nazareth?” Who is this man who opened the eyes of a man born blind, who gave back to a widow her dead son, who wept when his friend Lazarus died and then raised him from the dead? Who is this man who speaks of God intimately, and addresses Him as His father? Is He possessed? Or could He be the Christ of God?
 
My brothers and sisters, these questions are not academic. They are not for study in seminaries or theological colleges. They are fundamental, they are vital—literally a matter of (eternal) life or death—for you and for I: nothing less! That is why Our Holy Mother the Church raises them at the heart of her liturgical year, for we ignore them at our peril.
 
Of course, we live in a world where secularism and material expediency reign and where the question of “Who is Jesus of Nazareth?” is increasingly regarded as irrelevant if not politically incorrect or even dangerous. For its implications have the potential to overturn the secular political order and cause a revolution! And where more urgently do we need such a revolution than in a country where an unborn life is of no value if it is considered inconvenient and its murder is now a constitutional right, and where the government is now taking the next (‘logical’) step in promoting a culture of death, namely a ‘consultation’ on the provision of euthanasia? France is by no means singular in this godless pursuit—others, even with professedly Catholic leaders, are even further advanced on this path to perdition. “It is because [they] do not belong to God that they will not listen to [Him].”
 
In the midst of this infernal frenzy to reduce human beings created in the image and likeness of God to mere economic units disposable at will, we, dear friends, must ask ourselves “Who is Jesus of Nazareth?” And we must pursue this question. We must follow Him and come to know Him. We must listen to Him as He teaches in the Temple. We must encounter Him personally and look deeply into His eyes and enter into that very intimacy with Him that made great apostles out of mere fishermen and tax collectors—men who brought about that revolution upon which the foundations of Christianity were laid and Christendom was built.
 
For in the times in which Jesus of Nazareth taught human life was expendable also, perhaps even more so than in modern Western ‘democracies’ today. Those who listened to Him were as skeptical as any media commentator of our own time. His chosen apostles were as weak, impetuous, stupid and sinful as any of us. And yet their first-hand knowledge of Jesus, their intimate encounter with Him, opened their eyes, their hearts, their minds and their souls to the Truth He is, to the grace, life and power that He has to give. And that did change the world.
 
If Lent has already brought us face to face with the realities of good and evil and has called us to conversion, the Sacred Liturgy of this season of Passiontide repeatedly insists that we stand before the reality of Jesus of Nazareth Himself. It challenges us to look into His eyes, to walk with Him to Jerusalem and to endure His ongoing conflict with the Jews. It demands that we do not flee during his trial or crucifixion no matter how much we may fear suffering the same fate. Indeed, throughout Passiontide, the Liturgy insists that we ask—even as we kneel at the foot of the Cross in anguish and despair—“Who is this man? Could He truly be the Christ of God?”
 
The answer to these questions is veiled in so many ways: by our own sins, by our pursuit of wealth, of health, of power or of pleasure as ends in themselves, and the false gods of our times—secularism, relativism, syncretism, materialism—do all they can to prevent us from even asking them. But if we accompany Christ to the Cross, if we persevere in His intimate friendship unto the very end, the veil shall be removed and we shall encounter Him in the truly revolutionary glory of His resurrection. And here we shall find in Him the answer to all questions.
 
No matter how difficult they become, we must persevere in walking with Him in these privileged days—most particularly in the sacred rites. Before the altar this morning let us beg for the courage so to do, confident that, as our Lord teaches us in this Holy Mass: “If a man is true to My word, to all eternity he will never see death.” +