Download Fifth Sunday of Lent

Fifth Sunday of Lent: Fr. Rick Wilson To me one of the best movie genres is science fiction. I enjoy watching a writer’s story as a science fiction feature. Within this highly imaginative type of movie, I especially like tales depicting a world supposedly perfect. I find it interesting because every time such a world is presented, there is a glaring flaw showing that it really isn’t perfect. For example, the original Star Trek television series has an episode where two worlds that used to be at war with one another have brokered a peace for 500 years. Captain Kirk and his officers are impressed. But then they learn that the peace is not the result of the two worlds respecting each other. Rather, it seems that within a year 3 million people on both planets are to step into a disintegration chamber, voluntarily. Why? Well, this is how the peace is maintained – by sacrificing some of the people periodically through a computerized simulation of a war. Not finding a worthwhile reason for this, Kirk destroys some of the disintegration chambers and the conditional peace agreement is rendered null and void. Now the two planets have three options: 1. Repair the disintegration units and resume this bizarre arrangement; 2. Go to war in the traditional manner and roast each other’s worlds; 3. Renegotiate a peace based on mutual respect. The message: If peace is to be real, it must be complete. The sixth century prophet Jeremiah lived at a violent time. Jerusalem had been destroyed. Both the great temple of Solomon and the Jewish monarchy had been demolished. Jewish leaders were taken from their home to Babylonia. Frankly, the worst of times resulted. In this darkness, weeping Jeremiah expresses the belief that a time is coming when God will write God’s covenant on the heart of God’s people. This will be different than the covenant written on stone – the Mosaic covenant. Biblical scholar, Richard Floyd, says this great hope of the covenant written within one’s innermost being points to the time that people from the least to the greatest will know God with all the intimacy that word entails. One will not learn about God, one will know God from the internal covenant one has with God. With this internal gifting of the covenant, one will know God’s love, love others and oneself and possibly all creation as God loves. That day is yet to come. Yet there is one who seemed to have this intimacy with God – of having the covenant with God within his innermost being. It is Jesus. The late Marcus Borg, a renowned teacher, author and scholar, used various qualities of Jesus’ identity to help people understand the many aspects of Jesus – there are so many dimensions to Jesus as the Son of God – teacher, healer, community organizer, mystic. Right now of all those designations, I believe Jesus as mystic would define how Jesus lived this internal covenant. Marcus Borg defined a mystic as someone who has vivid and typically frequent experiences of God or the sacred or the Spirit. If one had this covenant within one’s innermost being, then one would be living a vivid ongoing experience of God. This vivid ongoing experience of God written within Jesus’ innermost being gave the man Jesus the ability to love God and to love what God had brought into being. The Word of God made flesh could communicate the heart of God. How utterly magnificent for Jesus, filled with the love of God, to look upon all that God loves, and yet how utterly saddening it must have been for Jesus, filled with the love of God, to see what the children of God were doing to one another. Impressive as Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, was at that time, it still did not bring about a world where all were treated with dignity. Jesus saw with the heart of God the beauty of humankind in spite of our attempts at self-­‐
wounding. Jeremiah’s people of God who would live with this covenant of the heart would treat one another in the manner that God’s love would have them treat one another. This is what Jesus brought in his public ministry. Listening to the Gospel reading, we can easily see how this imagery of the grain of wheat falling into the ground, dying, and then growing can apply to Jesus’ execution, burial and resurrection. But I would like to suggest that it also can apply to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry – the time of his baptism. Jesus’ baptism begins his public ministry. It is at his time that the grain of wheat is to fall into the earth and die. How so? The private life of Jesus is coming to an end – that is the grain of wheat. Now the Spirit of God descends upon the Word of God to begin the mission God the Father has given Jesus. The 40 days in the desert following his baptism is the seed settling into the earth from which Jesus’ mission will grow. As Jesus heals, reconciles, and teaches, his actions and words bear much fruit. Lives are changed as people experience the touch of God through the person of Jesus. An attempt is made to silence this communicator of God’s presence. But the attempt fails and an even stronger presence and mission of Christ results from his death and resurrection to bear even more and more fruit. Jesus lived Jeremiah’s dream of God’s covenant of the heart. And though we are not experiencing the covenant of the heart that Jesus experienced, using the words of Woody Bartlett, we are invited to “explore the ways we need the law of love to be written in our hearts.” Jesus remains our teacher and his Spirit invites us to learn and grow. We need to be willing students. Amen!