Published on 18 March 2024

Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab, rector of the Sanctuary

5rd Sunday of Lent – ​​Year B

1st reading: Jeremiah 31, 31-34

Psalm: 50 (51), 3-4, 12-13, 14-15

2rd reading: Hebrews 5,7-9

Gospel: John 12,20-33

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We have, in the first reading, one of the great prophetic announcements. — it is in the prophet Jeremiah — of the new Covenant promised by God. And the characteristic of this new Alliance is: “I will put my Law deep within them; I will write it on their hearts. They will no longer have to teach each his companion, nor each his brother. Everyone will know me from the youngest to the oldest”.

In what way will the Lord carry out this inscription of the law in the depths of our hearts, and this interior revelation? It is through the gift of his Holy Spirit in the sacraments of Christian initiation: baptism, confirmation and the Eucharist, which form a whole and which catechumens normally receive at once in the Easter Vigil.

Each sacrament has its own object:

Through baptism, we become children of God by passing through death with Christ, and by being united with the resurrected Christ.

In the sacrament of Confirmation, this Spirit who acted in us to make us children of God is given to us in full as our own spirit.

And finally, in the Eucharist, we receive this ordinary nourishment of the life of the disciple of Jesus which means that, week after week, Sunday after Sunday, we come to revive in ourselves and nourish in us this union with Jesus which is the heart of our Christian life.

By the way, ladies and gentlemen who are preparing for marriage, it is because the Holy Spirit is necessary for our Christian life that the Church asks you to receive the sacrament of confirmation, so that the sacrament of marriage, him, be truly full and whole.

How does the Holy Spirit speak to us? Well, in a very ordinary way when we meditate on the word of God or when we already contemplate Creation. Thérèse discovers this very early on. She explains it in manuscript A when she remembers the years she spent at the Abbey school in Lisieux, she was between 8 and 13 years old. She recounts this episode thus:

One day one of my teachers at the Abbey asked me what I did on my days off when I was alone. I told him that I went behind my bed into an empty space that was there and that it was easy for me to close with the curtain and that there “I was thinking”. But what are you thinking? she told me. I think of the good Lord, of life... of eternity, finally I think!... The good nun laughs at me a lot, later she liked to remind me of the time when I was thinking, asking me if I was still thinking... I understand now that I was praying without knowing it and that the Good Lord was already instructing me in secret.

This is the very simple experience that the prophet Jeremiah already announces to us: the good God who instructs in secret.

And she returns to it later — it’s the very beginning of manuscript B — in the letter she writes to her sister Marie du Sacré-Cœur. She writes this at a time when she herself is in terrible darkness, in the test of tragic hope. She says :

Don't think I'm swimming in consolations, oh no! My consolation is not having any on earth. Without showing himself, without making his voice heard, Jesus instructs me in secret.

And in still other places, in her writings or in her letters, she explains how, notably through the word of God, she allows herself to be instructed by Jesus himself. It is an experience that we can all have, brothers and sisters, in solitary prayer, in meditation on the Holy Scriptures: to let ourselves be instructed by the Holy Spirit himself. It is just a matter of verifying that we do not take “our bladders for lanterns”, and therefore of verifying that the interior illuminations which come to us are in conformity with the teaching of the Church.

Among the trials we encounter in our life are the trials of suffering and those of death. Jesus, God made man, comes, one might say, “on purpose” to experience this, to be able to tear us away from the power of death. He doesn't do it from the outside, he does it from the inside. Death is a concept; what exists is someone who dies. God can only gain victory in someone who dies. This victory is resurrection. And so Jesus will himself be confronted with suffering and death. This passage from chapter 5 of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us well, speaking to us of Christ who offers with loud cries and tears, prayers and supplications to God who could save him from death. And, the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, he was granted. Let us be clear, it is a question of being saved from death, it is not a question of being spared by death. And Jesus is indeed saved from death since he dies, he goes down to hell - this is what we will experience on Holy Saturday - and from there, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Father resurrects him in his mortal flesh and even makes him ascend to heaven and sit at his right hand… Jesus is indeed saved from death. And the letter continues: “ Although he was the Son, he learned obedience through his sufferings..

This is a theme that comes up very often in Saint Thérèse: the question of suffering.

This is a question that, personally, I have not finished exploring, far from it. But it seems to me that Thérèse's intuition is that, when everything is going well, it is easy to love. If I take the example of marriage: as long as your spouse is full of attention, delicacy, love and everything you want, it is quite easy to love him or her in return. But when he's annoying, selfish, cantankerous and whatever unpleasant thing you want, that's when we'll see if I'm really capable of loving him... which doesn't mean giving him all his whims, but which means continuing to seek one’s good. And there again, you can read in the Manuscripts how Thérèse tries to live this, particularly with a sister whom she cannot stand, and she says to herself: “But the Lord asks me to love her. So I will behave towards her as I would behave towards the person I like best. She will therefore try in every possible way to do him small favors, to be kind to him, to return a smile when Thérèse just has one desire, which is to throw something nasty in his face. (Cf. Manuscript C,13v-14r)

It is in trial that love is not only verified, but strengthened. And when the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that Jesus learned obedience through his sufferings, it is indeed the obedience of love that Jesus learns there in his humanity. It is always through trial that we can grow in charity.

Finally, in the Gospel, we heard that Greeks — that is, non-Jews who want to worship the holy God of Israel — want to meet Jesus. So they come to find an apostle, Philip, and Philip goes to find Andrew, and both of them go to find Jesus. Jesus' response is astonishing: why does he start talking about grains of wheat? It is possible that this is an explicit reference to the mystery of Eleusis which is a very ancient mystery — Eleusis is a city south of Athens, where sacred mysteries were played out to initiate those who wanted to into the secrets of life. The last degree of initiation was linked to the contemplation of wheat. For what ? Because we can clearly see that the wheat is growing, the ears full of grain; we re-sow the grains and the wheat grows back… We are there in an incessant cycle where we put the seed in the ground, but it grows back, we put the seed in the ground and it grows back, and it grows back by multiplying. But with man, it doesn't work that way. When you put a man in the ground, he doesn't grow back. And so, what is this secret of life that the grain of wheat contains and that man does not contain? We can hypothesize that Jesus is educated and that he knows these Greek mysteries and that he speaks to the Greeks about the grain of wheat. And what does he tell them? Yes, the grain of wheat sown in the ground will bear fruit, but on condition that it dies, that it dies to itself. It is not the same grain that is in the following ears. And he says in the same way: “He who loves his life loses it, whoever detaches himself from it in this world will keep it for eternal life”. For us it is a question of renouncing ourselves, of letting go and helping to put to death the old man, in order to be able to enter into the mystery of the Resurrection that Jesus will inaugurate. For us it is a question of renouncing our selfish and narrow self, so that the Holy Spirit can broaden our hearts, deploy God's charity in us and so that we can bear fruit; bearing fruit is always growing in concrete charity for God and for our brothers.

And to be able to experience this, we must attach ourselves firmly to Jesus.

What is a Christian? He is a loving disciple of Jesus. You know how Thérèse finally sums up her missionary appetite, in a beautiful formula in a letter to Father Bellière (LT 220 – February 24, 1897):

Love Jesus and make him loved.

But this is not specific to Thérèse, brothers and sisters, it is deep down the heart of the life of every Christian, of every disciple of Jesus: to love him above all, before all else. And I cannot love Jesus without having in my heart the desire to make him known and loved. And what does Jesus say? “If anyone wants to serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there will my servant also be. If anyone serves me, my Father will honor him”. Jesus himself will encounter this human difficulty of entering into the ordeal he must experience:

What am I going to say? “Father, save me from this hour”?

- But no ! This is why I have reached this hour! Father, glorify your name! »

And Jesus will enter freely into his Passion so that all men can be saved.

We are thus called to follow Jesus in his path, which is a path of life. We know that the Cross will open onto the Resurrection. We know that the offering that Jesus makes to us of his life leads him to the fullness of life. We can therefore understand that it is also a question of entering this path for us; that giving our lives out of love, in concrete charity for our brothers, giving our lives in the sacrament of marriage, giving our lives in consecrated life, this is a path of life.

We only lose ourselves if we seek to preserve ourselves.

We will only find ourselves by giving ourselves through Jesus, with Him and in Him.

Amen.