Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Today’s gospel is getting us into Easter and the priests can wear a special color: rose, for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, which is more colorful than purple. This Laetare Sunday is a moment to pause and check the panorama on the way to Easter. I never stop at the “scenic viewpoints” on the highways, and I regret it. Laetare means rejoice, be glad, because we are halfway to Easter.
The Church says rejoice, be at peace, even though you have financial troubles and uncertainties or serious family problems, you can rejoice, but, why? Because in the midst of all this precariousness of politics, of the economy, with health issues, there is something stable that is announced in this gospel: God’s love for you. Don’t worry Easter is not far away and we can surely rise with Jesus Christ over these events of death.
St. Paul says, “By grace you have been saved through faith and this is not from you; it is the gift of God.” Faith is to trust in God, who is your father. Faith is to love. It is not a struggle to believe, to convince yourself psychologically that God exists. No, it is a deep personal encounter with the person named Jesus Christ. When I met him in my early 20s, some forty years ago, my life began to change, little by little.
Faith is something that saves us so that we don’t have to live only for ourselves. Your efforts, your plans, your good wishes don’t save anything or anybody. Your little kiss to the statues is not faith. When you have adult faith, you can love. Faith is knowing that the Lord always sees you and always loves you. Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert so that all who believe in him will have eternal life.
Are you familiar with deserts? The Jews complained constantly in the desert and Lent is a time to mimic the desert. Maybe you have been grumbling in your heart these last three weeks since we often complain about everything: your spouse, your kids should be better, your projects are not working, your life is not what you want it to be. All this means that you live without love. Take a look at your thoughts because they affect you all day long and not just you, but also those around you. We have the Lord within us, and our thoughts should be ones of peace, joy, thinking the other is better than me.
Imagine 40 years in the desert, no water, no bread, no meat, too hot and at times very cold. When it was too hot God gave them a pillar of cloud to give them shade. And when the temperature dropped, which it does to nearly freezing, he gave them a pillar of fire to warm them. Nonetheless they complained about everything. So God sent them snakes and when they were bitten, they died. They realized that they were sinning against the Lord, and they asked Moses to intervene for them. God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and nail it on a pole and have the people look at it. When they did, they were healed. This foreshadows what Christ did on the cross. God chose his Son to cure us of this poison.
When a snake bites it puts a venom of poison in us. What is the poison that he puts in you and me? He constantly puts a poison in you saying, God doesn’t love you. If he loved you, you would be married by now, you would have a better car, you would not be sick, you would have been born in the US, your mother would not have abandoned you. This poison can be cured by looking at the cross, not in a magical way but with faith. Christ says, everyone who believes in me may have eternal life, which is what? That nothing can kill you, not physical death, but the death of your being, which is a profound death of not being loved, of being depressed, of the temptation to kill yourself. The remedy for death is Christ loving us. I believed that poison for many years as it circulated through my body until I had this experience of hearing, ‘you fool’, he loves you and gave you so many things that I thought were a mistake; he loves you.
I don’t know the poison in you, but I know the antidote: look at Christ. When I look at Christ I realize one thing—that this man who is God is on that cross because of my sins. He returns love, not hate, for all that I have done to him. This is the light. It helps you to see that you are a sinner, even worse than the others.
I am always impressed when I enter the church and see that Christ is crucified for me. I am encouraged by this every day. He is still there, still loving me no matter what; how good he is to us! I say, wow, he is still there for me even when I am a hypocrite. He always says, I love you, I love you, I love you.
The crystal glass looks clean even after you wash it but when you bring it into the light you can see the smudges, the fingerprints, the grease. If you take it out of the light, it looks beautiful, but in a srong light you see the truth. The same happens to us. We look good until a good light is turned on and then we see how weak we are, how often we look for human success and how often our thoughts are negative and judgmental. A Christian ought to be ready to die for the other, to give his life for a friend or for an enemy. This is what it means to be a light for others. May the Lord grant that we not be Pharisees or hypocrites but that we are called to be ‘Other Christs’.