# HOMILY 3RD SUNDAY LENT YEAR B – 4th March 2018 FOR OF

Exodus 20:1-17; Ps 18(19):8-11; 1 Corinthians 1:22-25; John 2:13-25.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

If only we knew how deep is God’s love for us – how differently we would see things. St Margaret Mary was blessed to experience something of its unfathomable depths. She wrote of one occasion when she was praying before the Blessed Sacrament exposed for Adoration in her convent at Paray-le-Monial. “I was experiencing an unusually complete state of recollection, my senses and faculties utterly withdrawn from their surroundings, when Jesus Christ, my kind Master, appeared to me. He was a blaze of glory – His five wounds shining like five suns, flames issuing from all parts of His human form, especially from His divine breast which was like a furnace, and which He opened to disclose His utterly affectionate and lovable heart, the living source of all those flames. It was at this moment that He revealed to me the indescribable wonders of His pure love for mankind: the extravagance to which He’d been led for those who had nothing for Him but ingratitude and indifference.”

She had seen a vision of the risen Lord Jesus in the glory of his five precious wounds and the power of His love for us, shown by His sacrifice on the Cross. We too need to go to the warmth and life-giving grace of the Risen Lord to feel the love streaming from His wounds. But to even get a glimpse of the depth of God’s love, we would do well also to think for a while what the life that we have in Jesus actually cost Him. In today’s second reading St Paul speaks of the scandal of the cross – how utterly unreasonable it is that the Saviour should have saved us through His death, even His death on a cross.

“The message of the Cross” says St Paul “is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18). And this is the message he is committed to preaching in season and out: “a crucified Christ; to the Jews an obstacle that they cannot get over, to the pagans madness, but to these who have been called … a Christ who is the power and the wisdom of God.”

Because it is so familiar to us, we can become blasé about the reality of the Cross; The physical agony that Jesus suffered for us, which modern science can very clearly describe. Hours and hours of great pain and suffering from the beating and scourging and the nails in His hands and feet through to his eventual death by slow suffocation. So horrible was the process of crucifixion that no one in polite society would ever talk about it.

But what the New Testament writers really want us to focus on is something even more important. It is the utter humiliation of the death of Jesus on a cross. A Roman crucifixion was a sign of disgrace and defeat for the victim. For a Jew to be hung up on a cross was seen as a curse (Deut 21:23 quoted in Gal 3:13). To be hung up naked and totally helpless was the supreme affront to human dignity. It was simply inconceivable to most Jews that their longed-for Messiah should die in agony, publicly humiliated at the hands of the hated Roman oppressors. I know it is hard for us to look at Jesus’ death this way, but we have to, if we are to appreciate the immense humility He showed in order that our pride might be forgiven.