5th Sunday of Lent
Cycle A
April 5-6,
2014 9:30am and 11:00am
Saint Margaret Parish, Bel
Air
A Personal
Encounter
Back in
November, Pope Francis published a long reflection entitled The Joy of the Gospel.
At the
very beginning, he says this: “I invite
all Christians, everywhere, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ. ‘Being a Christian is not an ethical choice
or a lofty idea, but the encounter with a person.’
“Thanks to this encounter with God’s love, we
are liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption. We become fully human when we become more
than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves.”
A Personal
Relationship
So, Pope
Francis is calling us to a personal relationship with Jesus.
What
does this mean? How can we have this?
I kind
of boil it down to two actions. There
are two things that we, on our part, have to do – and God will do his part also.
Action 1: Listen
First, we
have to listen, to listen to Jesus in the gospels.
The
gospels are the starting point. The idea
is to ground our lives on the Scripture, and especially the gospels.
The
gospels open up who Jesus is – what he thinks, how he feels, how he treats
people, how he handles different situations.
Jesus speaks to us in the gospels very personally.
So, it
is important to have a Bible and try to read a passage every day, just a short
passage, something that Jesus says or does, every day. And we need to listen.
What is
Jesus saying to me in this? We don’t
want it to be like being with someone but having our mind a million miles away
on something else.
We need
to listen: what is he saying to me and about me in this passage? This is the first action on our part that is
necessary for a personal relationship with Jesus.
Action 2: Speak
And
then we need to speak or talk with Jesus.
It is
important to bring ourselves to God just as we are. Speak with God about our worries over our
health or over some choice your son or daughter has made.
Speak with
God about the stress we experience on our job.
Speak about our disagreement with some teaching of the Church.
Speak
with God about the joy in your marriage or in a friendship. Speak about how proud we feel about our accomplishment
in school or sports or wherever.
We just
bring ourselves as we are and talk with God, and God will be there for us. God will listen and speak from within us, maybe
with insight or calming or strength.
But Jesus
will definitely be there with unconditional acceptance and love. This is needed for our personal relationship
with him.
“Do
You Believe?”
Now I am
talking about this because of today’s gospel.
In this
story, Jesus says “I am the resurrection
and the life” and then he asks Martha, “Do
you believe this?” Martha’s response
is crucial.
She
says: “I have come to believe that you
are the Christ, the Son of God.” Martha
does not profess belief in a teaching, even the teaching on resurrection.
Instead,
she first states her belief in Jesus.
She has come to a personal encounter or relationship with Jesus and this
is the core of her faith.
It is
this believing – in Jesus himself – that the passage is all about. In fact, the word “believe” occurs eight times in the passage.
This
tells us that Jesus is moving Martha and Mary and all of us to believe in him –
to have this encounter and relationship with him. That’s what counts.
As
Jesus says, “If you believe, you will
see.” It is as if he is saying, “If you believe in me, all else will follow,
like seeing all forms of dying as passages to fuller and fuller life.”
So it
is this relationship that Pope Francis and today’s gospel are calling us to
have. And to have it, we must 1) listen
to Jesus in the gospel and then 2) speak from our heart and that will be the center
of our faith and our life.
