First Reading Commentary
Our Lord had
compassion on His people then, and He has compassion on His people now. During Lent the Church guides us in her
liturgy to hear that call from God – a call to a more intimate union with Him
-- to acknowledge that our fidelity to Him has been less than perfect. His compassion and mercy are exercised most
especially in the Sacrament of Confession.
One cannot really return to the Lord wholeheartedly unless one embraces
that sacrament. God has given us great
saints from both genders and from all sorts of nations, races, levels of
education, body shapes and personalities; but the diversity vanishes when it
comes to Confession. The one thing that
the saints all had in common was their faithfulness to that sacrament.
We cannot
allow ourselves to be influenced or brainwashed by the pictures the enemy tries
to paint after the Church has been attacked.
As the story begins in this Reading even priests “added infidelity to
infidelity”. We all know about the
headlining news concerning the infidelity and apparent lack of faithfulness on
the part of some Catholic clergymen.
When priests falter publicly, then it could very well inflict damage on
the faith of the Church’s members. The
public sins of the Church’s ordained could leave images that make the Sacrament
of Confession appear less credible and make the belief in the Real Presence
less believable.
The enemy
works on the human intellect making it logical to ask why God would absolve the
sins of a penitent through a man whose behavior is far worse than the one
confessing sins; or why God would change the substance of bread and wine into
His sinless Body and Blood through a man who is not in a state of grace. Rest assured that is not usually the case as
most priests are faithful but surely it has happened. It’s quite possible that our Lord placed
Judas before us to show us that not every priest would be faithful. What we have to remember is that the power of
the sacraments is greater than anyone’s sins – greater than everyone’s
sins. Jesus instituted them, Jesus works
in them and He is stronger than death.
Second Reading Commentary
God has
given to us His grace, the gift of faith, and the sacraments, which can be
considered pledges of our eventual resurrection and eternal life. Each little step we make in the ongoing
process of conversion is like a mini-resurrection, one tiny step closer to a
new, full life in Christ.
Reflecting
on being “dead in our transgressions,” Saint Augustine said: “The time is come,
when the dead shall hear the Voice of the Son of God, and those who hear shall
live.” Faith is the foundation of all
virtues because without faith one cannot please our Lord and Savior. Good works are a result of faith but they are
not what save us; it is the grace of God that saves us. Being God’s “handiwork” does not only refer
to our body and soul but also the new creation we’ve become through Jesus
Christ.
Saint Paul
seems to compare our conversion with creation to show that we have been called
to this greatness. It is nothing that we
did to earn it. Just as we had nothing
to do with our own created selves, likewise we had nothing to do with the new
creation we’ve become in Christ. We have
no bragging rights except only to boast about God.
Gospel Commentary
Jesus uses the example
of the serpent lifted up in the desert in that whoever looked at it was cured
from the bite of serpents. This is a
figure of Jesus lifted up on the Cross.
Because Jesus uses the term “Son of Man” being “lifted up,” and the end
result being “eternal life,” we have to understand lifting up to really mean
“exalted” showing that the Cross is not an instrument of disgrace but of
glory. In fact, the Latin Vulgate uses
the word exaltari. Saint John Chrysostom writes: “As the
Israelites, bitten by the fiery serpents, were cured by looking upon the brazen
serpent, so are Christians cured by looking up with an active faith, replete
with love and confidence, on Jesus Christ crucified.”
Jesus is the Son of God
not only as the result of the Incarnation.
Jesus is God’s Son even before He was sent into the world. He is the Son from the beginning, the Word of
God from all eternity. Creation itself
proclaims the glory of God. The light of
day exposes everything while the darkness of night makes things more difficult
to see. But even in the darkness of
night the moon and the stars are radiant enough to remind us of hope.
Anyone who is old enough
to remember when Confession was always in a booth could probably relate well to
our Lord’s explanation of darkness and light.
In the Confession booth you were kneeling in darkness, and when the
priest slid open the little door so you could confess your sins, you could see
that the priest was sitting in a lighted booth.
Thus your sins are hidden in that dark booth until you confess them to
the priest seated in the lighted booth.
After Confession, sins are thus exposed to the light; and through
absolution the light overcomes the darkness.
The closing of this
Gospel account prods us to consider our own dispositions about the Sacrament of
Confession: “For everyone who does wicked things
hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not
be exposed. But whoever lives the truth
comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.”
