Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, B, Vigil
March 16, 2024
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.16.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3
The following text guided the homily:
* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us on the Fifth Sunday of Lent, on which in the Gospel some Greeks approach the Apostle Philip saying, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went to Andrew and Andrew went to tell Jesus. Jesus’ response to the Greeks’ desire to see him is not just surprising but outright shocking. He announced that they would see him glorified, but glorified not in the way everyone would have expected as an exalted civil leader, not like he was during the Transfiguration or as he will be at the end of time. No, Jesus said they would see him glorified when he would be lifted up from the earth on the Cross, when he would fall like a grain of wheat to the ground and die before being raised as the new Tree of Life. To see Jesus, like the Greeks, and to find him, we need to be prepared to behold him in humility on the Cross. And to see him enduringly, we must be prepared to follow him along the way of the Cross. Jesus tells us, “Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am there will my servant also be.” To find him we must follow him along the path of the grain of wheat, the path of losing our life so as to gain it. We must deny ourselves rather than affirm ourselves, die to ourselves on the Cross each day, and thereby follow him to real fruitful, unending life. This second point — about our exaltation — may seem equally shocking to us, just as shocking as Jesus’ glorification on the Cross.
* Pope Benedict commented on Jesus’ words in Sunday’s Gospel back in 2006 in his first encyclical (Deus Caritas Est). He called Jesus’ path — which is supposed to become our own path in faith — the “essence of love and indeed of human life itself.” Listen to the deep words of our former Holy Father: “Love is… a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: ‘Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it,’ as Jesus says throughout the Gospels. In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfillment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.”
* The new and eternal covenant that Jesus himself establishes, the new Passover on which Jesus wants to lead us, is, Pope Benedict says, an “exodus from the inward looking self to liberation through self-giving, authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.” We will only see God, we will only find our life, when we leave self-centeredness behind, when we stop trying to “preserve our life” in the rear-view mirror and rather learn to give our life as a grain of wheat, dying to ourselves in order to bear great fruit for God and others. This is the only path, Pope Benedict says, to the discovery of God and true self-discovery.
* So the first application of this Sunday’s Gospel is to ourselves who wish to see Jesus and love him in this world and forever in the next. We need to make an exodus from saving our life to losing it,
