Father Matthew Wiering Podcast

In John Chapter 12 we encounter Jesus at the height of his career. He has just raised Lazarus who had been dead four days in the tomb. When he enters Jerusalem for the last time, crowds gather to sing and wave palm branches in celebration. In today's Gospel we see that even the Greek-speaking Jews who have traveled a great distance to Jerusalem have heard about him and are trying to see him. Everybody is talking about him, and many desire to crown him King of Israel. It is at this moment, when Jesus has so many eating from the palm of his hand, that he announces how he, the Son of Man, will be glorified: "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it will yield a rich harvest. Whoever loves his life loses it, but whoever hates his life will save it for eternal life." To say that this is not what the crowd is expecting Jesus to say would be an understatement. Yet Jesus is showing us the secret to new life in Christ: We must die to ourselves every day, so that Christ will live anew within me.

In today's Gospel we hear the magnificent verses from John 3:16-17: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him." The 2nd reading from St. Paul is so similar: "God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions..." What do we believe God's attitude towards us is? How do we believe God feels about us? Do we believe he is disappointed, or frustrated, or angry, or indifferent? May the Word of God transform our mind so that we may believe that -- even when we are dead in our sins -- God has only one disposition towards us, which is love.

In today's Gospel Jesus turns over the tables of the money changers and drives out those who were selling livestock outside the Temple. He did this not because there was anything objectively evil going on but because he could sense that worldliness had invaded the sacred space of the Temple. When he sees disorder within God's house he has no time or tolerance for it but must drive it out. If this is true for the Temple in Jerusalem, which is merely a sign and foreshadowing of its fulfillment in the person of Jesus, how much more is this true when Jesus finds disorder within me, who St. Paul calls, "a Temple of the Holy Spirit." May we cooperate with this purifying work of Jesus and he sees and drives out evil within us!

In today's Gospel of the Transfiguration, the appearance of Jesus changes in front of the disciples. He appears dazzling with light, and the disciples are bedazzled! What's important for us to understand is that Jesus himself doesn't change at the Transfiguration, but the vision of the disciples does. They see him anew, as God. He is "God from God, light from light." Being able to see with the eyes of faith will change everything for them, especially as they go back down the mountain to "normal" reality, and especially as they witness Jesus suffer and die. May we too be granted true vision as we experience our own cross!

It might surprise us where the Holy Spirit sends Jesus immediately after anointing him at his baptism: He drives him into the desert to be tempted. He did this so that Christ could enter fully into our fallen humanity, including into those aspects which are most painful and humiliating for us. Here it is important to distinguish between being tempted and falling prey to temptation, which is to sin. As the author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, Christ was tempted in every way that we are, but he remained without sin. What consolation it is that Jesus knows the difficulty and struggle of our most intense temptations! May we learn to run to him (and not away from him) with confidence every time we find ourselves tempted.

One of the easy-to-forget details in the account of Jesus's healing of the man with leprosy is the fact that both the man and Jesus act in ways that were completely taboo, that would have been unthinkable in the time and culture of Jesus. The man comes right up to Jesus (which he was not supposed to do, lest he come in physical contact with another person and render them unclean (and perhaps communicate the deadly disease of leprosy in the process)). And Jesus, rather than running as fast as he could in the opposite direction, reaches out and touches the man. According to Mosaic Law, this would have rendered Jesus unclean and would have excluded him from public worship and from close contact with others for a period of time. But what happens instead? We see that Jesus is so clean that he can never be soiled but can only render clean those who approach him with confidence. So we should never hesitate to bring our uncleanness directly to him -- so that he will make us clean.