Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent
For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant
Passiontide. We enter into deep Lent. Already the focus is increasingly on the Cross, upon the Passion of Christ. His Passion is about his willing sacrifice for us, his willingness to be acted upon by our evil. But what does that really mean? “We see through a glass darkly”, Paul reminded us on the Sunday before Lent, Quinquagesima Sunday, even as the Gospel story about “go[ing] up to Jerusalem” was about Jesus telling us what was going to happen, telling us about the things of his passion, death, and resurrection. The point, at once disturbing and true to human experience, is that “they” – we – “understood none of these things”. The hope of the Quinquagesima Gospel was that like the blind man crying out from the wayside we might want to know, to see and to understand. But this meant that we obviously don’t see fully or clearly. Thus the Cross is veiled, especially in Passiontide, there before us but in the increasing awareness of its mystery, in the awareness of “the dullness of our blinded sight.”
Lent is about that journey of the soul with God into what God wants for us. But God’s goodness cannot be comprehended and grasped even partially without an awareness of our faults and failings, our sinfulness and wickedness which contribute to our brokenness.“The sacrifices of God”, the psalmist tells us, “are a broken spirit, / a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Ps. 51.17). This is powerful wisdom, a deep theological truth, and one which shapes our journey into the Passion of Christ.
On Passion Sunday, the Epistle and Gospel bid us reflect on the meaning of human redemption in Christ’s sacrifice. The theme is atonement. What will it take to restore us to oneness with God? It has everything to do with Christ as the Mediator between God and man because he is both God and man. His mediation is about his death, his “giv[ing] his life a ransom for many”. What does this mean? That is our struggle. The struggle to understand what redemption means belongs to our real good in God’s love and mercy. It begins by learning our lack, our incompleteness, our brokenness.
We are like the mother of Zebedee’s children and her sons. We think we know what is best for us and for one another but as Jesus says we “know not what [we] ask”. This is Jesus’ verdict on our desires. We do not really know what is good for us. Our reason is clouded over and our will disordered. Such are the effects and the reality of sin. We can however engage with the struggle to learn what God wills to provide for us through the sacrifice of Christ and our participation in that sacrifice; in short, “to strive to strive” towards such things. Such is Passiontide and especially Holy Week. Everything is concentrated on the way of the cross; at once the way of our betrayals of divine love and the triumph of that love for us and in us.
