HOMILY LENT WEEK 04 01 – Year I
Transformative Faith – Believing in Jesus and Living in Hope
(Is 65:17-21; Ps 30; Jn 4:43-54)
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When a lady was asked why she put in her will a request to be buried with a fork in her hand, her answer was because her mother always told her, “Keep your fork, the best is yet to come!”
That little anecdote and the readings today invite us to place our faith and trust in Jesus, then live in hope of transformation and the fullness of new life.
Oblate Pierre Olivier Tremblay, now a bishop in Quebec, used to minister to university students. He discovered most of them were struggling with a lack of hope because they lacked an infinite horizon of faith. They didn’t have a meta-narrative, a bigger picture into which they could place the events of their lives. As a result, they were at the mercy of the vicissitudes of everyday life. If a relationship broke up, it was like the end of the world for some, who would even take their own lives.
The readings today offer us precisely reasons to hope. The prophet Isaiah in the first reading proclaims confidently that God is creating a new heaven and a new earth. That new reality will far transcend anything we have experienced so far in terms of joy and delight.
Psalm 30 adds to that promise, even speaking in the past tense, as if that promise has already been fulfilled. For the psalmist, God has already drawn us up out of the land of the dead. restored to life those who had fallen into the pit of despair, and turned our mourning into dancing.
Scholars suggest that these words were written in the time of the second temple. The people were so focused on being brought back from exile that they ran the danger of missing the immense hope and promise of what God was really saying to them. As the commentary in The Word Among Us puts it, it was as if their idea of the length, height and depth of God’s love was limited by the length, height and depth of the Temple.
We also run the danger of settling for a smaller vision for our life and loved ones than what God promises. That is what John addresses in the gospel, as he carefully lays out the activity of Jesus to precisely make sure we don’t miss out on the immensity of the vision and hope that God casts in that activity. God’s love and promise far exceeds what we can imagine.
John tells us Jesus spent two days in Samaria, on his way back from Judea. That is where he had transformed the life of a shy, shame-filled woman who was living in a common-law relationship after four failed relationships. His love for her, acceptance of her as she was, and forgiveness of her past, vaulted her into a joyful, hopeful evangelist who brought the good news of Jesus to her own downtrodden people.
Then John reminds us that upon Jesus’ arrival in Galilee, he returned to Cana, where his mother Mary’s faith in him, and his own compassion for a young couple running out of wine at their wedding, led him to transform six huge jugs of water into the finest of wine, better than what anyone had tasted before. The stage was set for another even greater miracle involving faith in Jesus meant to instil hope in us to transpire, and take place it did.
A royal official, whose son was on the verge of death, had travelled from Capernaum to ask Jesus to heal his son. This official believed in the word of Jesus when he told him his son would live. Full of hope, he travelled back for a full day, to be told by his servants who met him before he even got home, that his son was healed precisely at the moment that Jesus had told him the day before that his son would live. That miracle deepened his faith, not only in the word of Jesus, but he and his whole family now put their faith in Jesus as the Messiah who had come to redeem the world.
In the gospel of John, the series of seven signs or miracles he describes are all meant to reveal that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah and the Son of God, fulfilling all the prophecies of the Old Testament that the blind would see, the lame walk, the mute speak, the deaf hear, the oppressed set free, and the dead be raised to life.
They are also meant for us, to give us hope that God turns everything, even the hardships and suffering of a pandemic, to the good for those who love God and place their faith in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God. Whatever is happening to us, however hopeless our situation may seem, we have been given an infinite horizon of faith, a mega-narrative by Jesus, that offers us hope and gives us a bigger picture into which we can place the events of our lives. That transformative hope and newness Jesus offers as the Messiah is already ours whenever we come to him with faith and in hope for forgiveness of our sins, and healing of our painful emotions and negative attitudes.
As Fr. Robert Wild writes in a 1991 Lenten edition of the Nazareth Journal, “Deep down underneath everything is tremendous life and vitality. Just as we cannot really create anything but can only rearrange elements that already exist, so too our efforts at destruction are only superficial. A forest can be destroyed by fire; but it will grow again. Given time, the deep-down life in things will re-remerge.”
As God fed the Chosen people manna in the wilderness when everything seemed hopeless to them, the Eucharist is both manna for our own journey through the vicissitudes of life, sustaining us with faith, as well as a foretaste of that eternal banquet we will share in a new heaven and a new earth, filling us with hope.
May our celebration deepen our faith in Jesus as the Messiah, fill us with hope in the future, and empower us to live in a present that is transformed by the peace and joy only Jesus can give us.
