Have you ever thought about the fact that every sickness, every ailment, and every evil that has tried to separate us from God or from one another was challenged and conquered by Jesus in the Gospels? Lepers were cleansed and restored to their place among God’s people. Sick children were restored to their parents, the blind and the lame got up and walked with Christ among His followers. Outcast tax collectors and sinful women were no longer cast out but included. Samaritans and Romans were drawn into faith and included among those who knew God’s healing and forgiving love. Even in our present day, look at how the virus has had the potential to separate us, but here we are – maintaining a spirit of hope, tried and tested, but not defeated.
Time after time, Jesus willingly identified with and, in a sense, took the place of those He invited and led to faith and hope. When He touched lepers and sinners, when He ate with tax collectors, and when He went into the homes of His enemies, He became one with them and was one of them in the eyes of His adversaries.
Our Lenten journey has been preparing us for this: to realize that one last enemy, one last evil, one last sickness was yet to be touched and shared – death. When Jesus confronted death on the Cross, everything would be complete and everything that threatened to separate us would be destroyed.
John’s Gospel unfolds the plan and wisdom of God with the directive that we are to abandon our desire for self-preservation, our singular attachment to this mortal life, and reach for the life Jesus has promised and will reveal in His Resurrection. The death He will experience is His final and complete embracing of our human lives. By accepting the most terrible death that could be imagined, in fact, He leaves out no one, so conformed is He to our human experience.
In John 12,20-33, Jesus says “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” Jesus later proclaims from the Cross, “It is finished” – which is to say that there is nothing left except “new life” which will soon burst out of a grave. Death is no more. Fear is finished. God’s promises are fulfilled. This is the mystery of the Cross, then, that makes it a sign and a promise of glory. This is the glory that awaits all who follow Christ through death and into life. It is what we are called to share with all those who have asked to see Jesus. Are we ready to share the life and glory which we have found in Him?
