NO CROSS, NO CROWN

Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year B. Heb. 5:7-9; John 12:20-33.

AIM: To proclaim the power of the cross.

 

          “In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh,” we heard in our second reading, “he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death.” The words refer to Jesus’ anguished prayer in the garden of Gethsemane the night before he died. John’s gospel, from which today’s gospel reading is taken, contains no record of this prayer. Instead John records Jesus’ prayer at the Last Supper in the upper room. We heard part of it a few moments ago: “I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?  But it was for this that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”

          Jesus’ humanity was not a mask. It was real. He really experienced what we experience. He suffered as we suffer. Before his encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus was tired from a long journey on foot, and thirsty (cf. Jn 4:6). At the death of his dear friend Lazarus “Jesus wept” (Jn 11:35). Facing the agony of crucifixion, Jesus felt the intense anguish that anyone of us would feel in such a desperate situation. 

          And so, with all the fervor of which he was capable, Jesus prays for deliverance from death. Immediately, however, he goes beyond this prayer to ask that he not be delivered from death, should acceptance of death be the means of glorifying his heavenly Father’s name. That petition is part of the “prayers with loud supplications and tears” referred to in our second reading. That reading goes on to say: “And he was heard because of his reverence.”            

          Was Jesus’ prayer heard? Isn’t the cross the proof that his prayer was not heard — or at least not granted? So it would seem. In reality, however, the cross is not the place of Jesus’ defeat, but of his ultimate triumph. Jesus confessed his faith in this triumph when he said in today’s gospel: “Now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” It was “the ruler of this world” — Satan, the personification of evil — who brought Jesus to the cross. In this passage, however, Jesus professes his faith that Satan’s triumph would be an illusion. The empty tomb of Easter shows that the victor in that cosmic conflict between good and evil was not “the ruler of this world”, but Jesus Christ.

          The price of that victory, however, was Jesus’ death. Why? Jesus answers this question with a lesson from nature. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” We are part of that fruit — a portion of that great harvest which Jesus sowed when, on Calvary, he cast the precious seed of his own life into the soil of that earth for love of which he had been born at Bethlehem some three decades before.  That we are Catholic Christians more than twenty centuries later in a land and continent undreamed of in Jesus’ day, is proof that Jesus spoke true when he said, at the conclusion of today’s gospel: “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.” Jesus voluntarily laid down his life that we might live. And he summons us to live as he lived: “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be.”

          Where is Jesus Christ today? He is in every place of human need and suffering. He is in prison cells on death row. He is with the victims of poverty, oppression, and war. He is with all those who are suffering: in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza; in Somalia, Sudan, and the Congo. And he is also with those who sacrifice their own interests, safety, and lives to help others.

          Here is the story of one such sacrifice. In July 1941 the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe was a prisoner in the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, when a prisoner escaped. In reprisal the Nazi commandant ordered ten men from the missing prisoner’s barrack to be starved to death in an underground bunker. One of the men selected cried out: “My wife! My children!” Fr. Kolbe immediately asked to take the man’s place. In the starvation bunker he celebrated Mass daily, as long as he was able to do so, and gave Communion to his fellow prisoners. Sympathetic guards brought him unleavened bread and small quantities of wine. After three weeks without food or water, only Kolbe and three other prisoners were still alive. When he alone remained, he was killed by a lethal injection. The man whose life Fr. Kolbe had saved was present at Kolbe’s canonization as a martyr by Pope John Paul II forty-one years later, on October 10^th, 1982.

          Would any of us have the courage to make a sacrifice comparable to that made by the man whom we may now call St. Maximilian Kolbe? We cannot say. What we can say is that there is a direct line between the words of Jesus about the seed falling into the earth and dying, so that it can become fruitful, and the willingness of this Polish priest to sacrifice his life, so that a brother human being with responsibility for wife and children might live.

          “When I am lifted up from the earth,” Jesus says in the gospel – and he is speaking about being lifted up on the cross – “I will draw everyone to myself.” To learn the deepest meaning of our Christian faith we must take our stand beneath Jesus’ cross and contemplate in silent awe and reverent love the One who hangs there. All the great lessons of life are learned at the foot of the cross.