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Live
Letters Fifth Sunday of
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The Catholic Telegraph
April 7, 2000Once again our gospel reading is from the gospel of John and once again it deals with Jesus’ passion, death, and glorification. The request of the Gentile Greeks to be put in touch with Jesus seems somehow to have indicated for Him that His public ministry was near its end. He begins to reflect on what lies ahead of Him: glorification that would arise from suffering and death, pain from which He might have wished to be freed except for its redemptive value. A voice from heaven offers Him reassurance and the passage ends with Jesus promising that His being lifted up (i.e., His death and resurrection) would draw sinful humanity to Himself. Note that the element offered by the Gethsemane scene in the other evangelists - Jesus being troubled at what lay ahead of Him - is presented here in the gospel of John.
Our live letter is a commentary on the significance of the Gethsemane scene and on the significance of Jesus’ suffering for our salvation.
In the portion of the Letter to the Hebrews from which our reading is taken, the author is explaining how Jesus is a more effective high priest than were the priests of the Old Law. He is constantly interceding for us in heaven, yet He is able to sympathize with our weakness and limitations, having shared them Himself in His humanity.
In this Sunday’s passage we hear about Jesus’ humanity in greater detail, specifically about His dread at the suffering that lay ahead of Him as He faced the end of His life and about His willingness to be obedient to what the Father asked of Him. He offered "prayers and supplications," which resulted not in His being dispensed from the need to suffer and die, but in His death becoming a source of new meaning for human life. Although He was the fully divine Son of God, He still needed - in His human nature - to learn and express human obedience, even when that obedience demanded suffering and humiliation. It was that obedience that became the source of salvation for those who would be willing to be conformed to Him.
There are two things that are important for us to be attentive to as we move toward the culmination of Lent in Holy Week.
The first is that Jesus’ sufferings were real and that they were His sufferings. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all show us Jesus praying in the garden to be freed from the terrible ordeal that He knew was facing Him. It wasn’t some pageant that He was about to take part in, but one of the most excruciating and humiliating methods of criminal execution that human ingenuity had been able to devise. This Sunday’s gospel shows us Jesus being troubled at what the end of His public ministry involved. Jesus knew He was going to suffer and He really did suffer. Some early Christians found the idea of Jesus’ suffering and death so repugnant that they held that these sufferings were mere appearances and didn’t really touch or affect Him. The Church quickly rejected this idea as heretical. Jesus really suffered. Jesus really died.
Yet the significance of His death is not to be found so much in the intensity of the suffering that surrounded it, but in the obedience that inspired it. Our first parents had sinned in wanting to do things their way, in spite of what God had asked of them. Original sin was a sin of disobedience, and it destroyed the special relationship that had existed between God and humanity. The restoration of that relationship required obedience, the willingness of someone to carry out God’s will even if the immediate result was rejection, misunderstanding, suffering, agony, and death. This is the meaning of Christ’s life and death. Here was One who was fully human, yet fully God, and Who was willing to offer His Father human obedience even if that obedience cost Him His human life.
Jesus redeemed us because everything that He did throughout His life was done out of reverence for and response to His heavenly Father’s love for His human creatures. He lived a human life as God had intended it from the beginning, a life of obedience. Because that human life was lived in the context of human sinfulness, it resulted in Jesus’ rejection and death. But its value does not lie in the pain and suffering that accompanied it, as if the Father somehow needed to watch His Son being tormented. The value of Jesus’ life - and His suffering and death - lies in the obedience and reverence that His humanity offered to the Father through it all. It wasn’t the degree of Jesus’ pain that saved us, but the depth of His obedient dedication, even when that obedient dedication brought Him suffering and death.
We are saved by Jesus because, through baptism, we share in His risen life, a life that is the Father’s response to His obedience. Our life in Christ is to be a life of obedience, too, not to earn our salvation but to be consistent with it.
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Conversation Questions
Has God’s call to obedience ever caused me to suffer?
What role do Christ’s sufferings play in my life?
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