Friday, February 05, 2021

ST. JOHN 12:26-28

 

                                                               

Whoever serves Me must follow Me, and where I am, there also will My servant be. The Father will honour whoever serves Me. [v.26]

One of the striking things about Jesus’ love for us is how often He includes in His teaching fidelity to Him encapsulates promise: promise of intimacy with He the Divine Lover, thus through Him with our Beloved Abba and the Beloved Holy Spirit: And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to Myself, so that where I am you also may be. [14:3]; Father, they are Your gift to Me. I wish that where I am they also may be with Me, that they may see My glory that you gave Me, because You loved Me before the foundation of the world. [17:24] [see also: Mt. 16:24; Mk. 8:34; Lk. 9:23]

Love has created us to be beloved and to love the Holy Trinity in return through loving one another and ourselves, that is to rejoice that we are, others are, human beings in the image and likeness of God who is Love.

Suddenly, as if wrenched from His Heart, so filled with love for us, with such divine fire of love that fire makes the core of the sun cold as ice in comparison, Jesus states: “I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.” [v.27]

No longer the expression: “My hour has not yet come.”, now it IS this hour. In St. John, the Synoptics and in Hebrews we see both Jesus’ love for and obedience to the Father and the absolute agony in His Heart, and in His body: the price of our redemption is His suffering and death. [cf. Jn. 6:38; 18:11; Mt. 26: 38,39; Mk. 14: 34-36; Lk. 22:43; Heb. 5:7-8] While we may, should, have empathy for anyone we see suffering, and Jesus sees all of our suffering, the weight of our sins and the way they wound us, compounding our sufferings, He sees us – you and me and everyone – not as an amorphous collective but as the beloved individuals we are: His, the Father’s, the Holy Spirit’s Beloved and He sees too that not every human being, from Adam to the last person to be given breath of life, accepts this love, nor accepts redemption.

This latter, the rejection of love and redemption, makes His suffering acute for the very purpose of His Passion and Death, is to redeem, heal, for He is Divine Mercy.

All of us have experienced at some point in our lives the rejection of our pro-offered love, an offer to help someone we love. It hurts that rejection; it burns and gashes the heart.

Every sin is just such rejection, of Christ Himself in the other and gashes the Heart of Jesus, whose infinite of infinite redeeming love for us is greater than out capacity for sin. He pays the price, through His Passion and death for our redemption from sin, renewed in the gift of the Sacrament of Confession/Reconciliation, that we might be converted again and need not be lost in our sin nor cut off from His love, if we repent and try anew to live lives that are loving, peaceful and without sin.

“Father, glorify Your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” [v. 28]

The Father glorified His Name through Christ’s Incarnation, Nativity, Passion, Death and Resurrection, for Jesus is the face of God in the flesh. This is made manifest powerfully at Jesus’ baptism, a Trinitarian moment when Jesus, taking all our sin upon Himself, emerges from the water and: After Jesus was baptized, He came up from the water and behold, the heavens were opened, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove coming upon Him. And a voice came from the heavens, saying, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” [Mt. 3:16,17] On coming up out of the water He saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit, like a dove, descending upon Him. And a voice came from the heavens, “You are My beloved Son; with You I am well pleased.” [Mk. 1:10,11] After all the people had been baptized and Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are My beloved Son; with You I am well pleased.” [Lk. 3:21,22] and St. John notes about the wedding feast at Cana and the changing by Jesus of water into wine: Jesus did this as the beginning of His signs in Cana in Galilee and so revealed His glory, and His disciples began to believe in Him. [Jn.2:11]

Jesus himself is the presence of the living God. God and man, God and the world, touch one another in him………In his self-offering on the Cross, Jesus, as it were, brings all the sin of the world deep within the love of God, and wipes it away. Accepting the Cross, entering into fellowship with Christ, means entering the realm of transformation and expiation. [1]

The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. [1 Cor. 1:18]

Discipleship is to be one with Christ in the Garden, on the Cross, in the Tomb that when the day comes, and through the portal of death we are taken up into the heart of the Trinity, this is to be one with Christ in His Glorious Resurrection.

 

 

[1] JESUS of Nazareth; HOLY WEEK: from the entrance to Jerusalem to the Resurrection; p.40; Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI; Ignatius Press 2012

© 2021 Fr. Arthur Joseph

 

 

 

 

 

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