5th Sunday of Lent 2024
Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 5:7-9; John 12:20-33
Our Lenten journey with Christ is far advanced. Next Sunday, we shall be entering Holy Week, travelling no longer through the wilderness but along the road to Calvary, and finally to the Resurrection. We catch hints of that journey today.
Jeremiah sets us on the way by speaking of the New Covenant. This draws us towards Holy Thursday, when Jesus first gave us the blood of that Covenant, when He consecrated the wine of the Passover meal, which was thus transformed into His Blood, the Blood which was to be shed next day, and was to be available to us through the rest of time as a sign of our union with and in Him. Our first questions therefore are “How reverently do I approach the Body and Blood of the Lord?” and “How deeply do I appreciate the Covenant which is thus sealed between God and me and the whole of God’s people?”
The anonymous author of the Letter to the Hebrews, from which our Second Reading is taken, also points us toward the events of Holy Week. He writes that “during His life on earth, Christ offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the one who had the power to save Him out of death”. Does that put you in mind, as it does me, of the Agony in the Garden, when Jesus’ mental struggle caused His sweat to fall like drops of blood, and He prayed “If it be possible, let this cup pass me by, but let it be as you, not I, would have it”?
I am often critical of the Jerusalem Bible’s translation of the New Testament, but here its compilers deserve praise. The Greek text states that the Father had the power to save Jesus ek thanatou which can mean “from death” or “out of death”. Here, the JB opts for the latter which, I think, is the more helpful of the two. Our Lord was not saved FROM death: He died, and “descended into hell” a statement which deserves closer analysis, though that is another task for another day. He was dead, and He had to be lifted OUT OF death; otherwise, the Resurrection would have been nothing more than resuscitation.
There is another statement in the Letter which is mind boggling. We are told that Jesus “learned to obey “from what He suffered, and HAVING BEEN MADE PERFECT…..”. If that doesn’t boggle your mind, nothing will. The Son of God had to be made perfect.
At this point, the sisters are searching desperately for missiles to throw, as they know what is coming next: they have heard it so often. Perfection is a process, rather than a state: it comes from the Latin “perfectus” meaning “thoroughly made”, “complete”. The Greek equivalent, which is what we have here, is teleiotheis, from telos meaning “the end”. So Jesus was completed, fulfilled, made the end product, by suffering. Until He suffered, He lacked something in His humanity. It was suffering which made Him complete—perfect in that sense. As with Him, so with us: we mustn’t worry that we are not yet perfect.
Turning to the Gospel, we find another reference to the Agony in the Garden. “Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say: Father, save me from this hour? Yet it is for this very reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”
This is the nearest that John comes to describing the Gethsemane experience of Our Lord. If we didn’t have the other three Gospels, we would make little of it, but in the light of Matthew, Mark, and Luke we can grasp the reference.
There is a reason why John doesn’t enter into the physical details, but allows the other three to describe them. His intention is to describe the Passion and death of Jesus as a triumph. For John, Our Lord’s victory came, not only in His resurrection, but in the whole process of accepting Passion-Death-Resurrection. Jesus is to be “lifted up from the earth” not only in His Resurrection or Ascension, but in the lifting of His body on the Cross. This is the Fourth Gospel’s particular contribution to our understanding of the Passion.
One other thing should be said of John. His use of the term “the Jews” has contributed, tragically, to two millennia of anti-Semitism, to the extent that some have argued that we shouldn’t use His Gospel on Good Friday. Anti-Semitism is totally abhorrent and to be condemned, but what is needed is an explanation of what John means by “the Jews”. It is his shorthand way of referring to the authorities, to those who rejected Jesus. We must never forget that Jesus, Mary, John himself, and the early disciples were Jews, and his use of what was for him a technical term should not lead us into misunderstanding, or cause us to lose his unique insight into the Passion.
