But a short time ago, we celebrated the Nativity. Churches, adorned for Christmas, portrayed the infant Jesus surrounded by Joseph and Mary, a few animals and shepherds and strange foreigners from the East call Magi. We celebrated our faith that Jesus was the Word of God become human. While retaining his full divinity, he assumed our full humanity: truly God and truly human. Unfortunately, many forget that God did not intend for the Son to remain an infant, but to become an adult man. It is the adult man Jesus who would begin a public ministry with the mission of proclaiming repentance from sin for the kingdom of God was at hand. God sent His Son on a rescue mission. The mission of the essence of why he was born.
Looking toward Lent, I invite you to consider three aspects of Jesus’ mission of redemption. First, Jesus came to teach us by word and example how to live as children of God. Secondly, Jesus died on a cross to take away our sins, rose from the dead and gave us the Holy Spirit to give us power to live as children of God. Finally, Jesus’ death and resurrection provides us the reason to want to live as children of God.
Jesus came to teach us
None of us are born with the knowledge required to live a faithful life as a child of God. Our hearts may grow restless as we mature into adulthood, to paraphrase St. Augustine, but we need someone to show us the way to God. When Israel was led out of the desert by Moses, it was at Mt. Sinai that they were given the Ten Commandments. There were other laws given to the people as recorded in the Book of Exodus, but the Ten Commandments were essentially the bare minimum for what they would need to live faithfully as a people of God. Moving forward to the New Testament (Matthew’s Gospel), Jesus preached Sermon on the Mount. In that sermon, he explained what it meant to embody the commandments of God in a much deeper way. If we did nothing more this Lent than reflect on this sermon from Matthew, chapters five through seven, it would be a good Lent! We often forget that we are born ignorant of the ways of Christian faith. We need to be taught right from wrong and what is good from what is evil. It is a primary reason why, at an early age, we teach children about the faith we hold dear. Growing into a mature Christian just doesn’t happen automatically. It demands that we learn what to believe and how to act.
Jesus came to empower us
Empowerment is at the heart of the Lenten/Easter Season. Through the cross, Jesus took on the sins of all humanity of all-time and redeemed us. Lent encourages us to reflect on the message of the cross. As is repeated at each station in the Stations of the Cross, “We adore you or Christ and we praise you, for by your holy cross, you have redeemed the world.” But it is not just the death of Christ that provides us hope. The Paschal Mystery is more than about the cross of Christ as essential as the cross is. Jesus not only died for our sins on the cross, he rose on the third day to give us hope of life beyond the grave. St. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, is very clear about this essential connection between death and resurrection. In the passage read yearly at the Easter Vigil St. Paul states: “Through baptism into his death we were buried with him, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live a new life. If we have been united with him through likeness to his death, so shall we be through a like resurrection” (Romans 6: 4-5).
This is a passage about Christian initiation. In baptism, which is intensified in confirmation, we receive the Spirit of the risen Christ, the third Person of the Holy Trinity. Too often, it seems as if the Spirit is dormant in the lives of Christ’s followers, but the intent of the sacraments of baptism and confirmation are about empowerment. It is a good reason why we should ask for the Holy Spirit to fill us. We say in the following prayer, “Come Holy Spirit. Fill the hearts of Your faithful…” When we make this prayer with consistence and persistence and with an expectation that when we honestly seek the Spirit to fill us, we better be ready for a change in our lives.
Living as a Christina is not about being a good person. It is about becoming holy. Too often people believe that it is when they try to be good that God will approve of them and love them: live a good life and God will accept us in to heaven. In reality, God simply loves us all the time. We are good because God created us. Holiness comes by responding to God’s invitation to a life of grace. When we sin, we become alienated from God. God cannot sweep away our sins as if this doesn’t matter for God. This would be contrary to justice due to God. It would mean that God is not being true to Himself and God cannot overlook sin as if it is irrelevant. The antidote is mercy. God’s mercy is God’s justice, but we have to allow God to be merciful in our lives. Entrusting ourselves wholly to the way of Jesus and what he teaches us by his word and example and through the Apostolic tradition of the Church demands openness.
Jesus came to provide us a reason
The primary reason for being Christian is hope for life beyond this life. Our baptism into Christ expresses the goal for our lives and leads us to life with Christ in a Communion of Saints. Because of his rising from the dead, we who are in Christ, have the promise of eternal life. This is our faith. This is our hope. Through his Passion and death, the Lord faced humanity’s greatest enemy – sin and death – and he overcame sin and death once and for all. We who are immersed into the waters of rebirth and anointed with the Holy Spirit, share in the promise of his life without end. Our conviction is that Christ, who once was dead, has now risen from the dead, never to die again. As we embrace this conviction in our day to day living, we believe that we will share his life forever.
Please help us continue
