BEHOLD, WE GO UP TO JERUSALEM

A SERMON FOR QUINQUAGESIMA

Quinquagesima Sunday is third and final trumpet call serving as a reminder of the coming of Lent.  These three pre-Lenten Sundays of Shrovetide serve the purpose of preparing us for Lent, and now that we’re only three days away from Ash Wednesday, the Church wants to make absolutely sure we know what it’s all about.  The Gospel and Epistle today cover the three main incentives for making a good Lent.  

First of all, in the Gospel, our Lord speaks to us about his future sufferings, that he will be delivered to the Gentiles (the Romans), and mocked and scourged and spit upon, then put to death.  This is the first direct allusion to his Passion and Death that we have seen in this year’s liturgical cycle.  Just as our Lord prepared his Apostles for those terrible events, so does the Church today put his words before us again, to prepare us in the same way.  With the benefit of our faith, this should arm us for the battle against the flesh which Lent truly is.  What greater incentive could there be for us to abandon our usual self-pampering, to sacrifice the gratification of our vain and trivial appetites, than when we’re confronted with the enormity of love that our Lord showed for us on Good Friday. If he could do all that for me, then surely I can do something for him…

We are entering upon the season of the Passion of our Lord.  His sufferings are not merely to be meditated upon in a drama that transpires before the eyes of our mind.  Note our Lord’s words when he says that weare going up to Jerusalem. He no longer wants to suffer alone, as he did that first Good Friday, when his apostles first slept through his agony in the Garden, then ran away and hid themselves when the soldiers came to arrest him.  Now he has a mystical body, a Church, whose members will surely follow him on the road to Calvary. This is the first meaning of Lent – the following of Jesus, the following of the crucified Lord. All Lenten practices serve as a means of subduing and crucifying the baser part of our fallen nature, and are a participation in the sacred Passion of our Lord. We cannot celebrate the Resurrection of Christ at Easter, unless we have followed the way of the cross with Christ during the time of Lent. 

The Gospel continues with a miracle of healing. Our Blessed Lord is on His way to Jerusalem when He meets a blind beggar. As soon as this beggar is aware that our Lord is passing by, he cries aloud: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Our Lord stops, allows the blind man to come closer, and asks him: “What wilt thou that I do for thee?” And he says: “Lord, that I may receive my sight.” And our Blessed Lord says to him: “Receive thy sight; thy faith has made thee whole.” and the beggar follows our Lord to Jerusalem, glorifying God.

Who is this blind man by the wayside?  He represents all of us.  We who suffer from spiritual blindness, we who fail to fully see the depth of Christ’s love for us, we may now approach the Son of God made man as he passes by this Lent on his way to Calvary and we may cry out from the very depths of our soul:  “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” And our Lord cures us from the blindness of our sin.  He  restores our spiritual sight by his Passion and Death, and so, like the blind beggar, we may then follow our Lord to Jerusalem, glorifying God.

            

This is the second great incentive for us to make a good Lent.  All we need do to have the fullness of grace restored to our souls is to cry to God for mercy with true desire for forgiveness.  To have repentance in our heart and the resolution to do better in our mind.  “Have mercy upon us, O Lord, for we have sinned against thee.  Say but the word, and my soul shall be healed.”  For the sake of our own souls, our salvation, and our eternal happiness therefore, we will cry out to God this Lent, and ask for his grace and for his mercy.

Finally, there remains one last motivation to draw us closer to God this Lent.  Without this last one, we shall not succeed, and no matter what we do this Lent out of just “duty”, or “because we have to”, it will all be for nought without this third and most important motive.  It is not enough for us to merely acknowledge God’s love for us on the Cross.  It isn’t enough just to mouth words of repentance and acknowledge our own sinfulness.  We could do all this, but it would be for nothing.  We could “speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but we would become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.  We could understand all mysteries , and have all knowledge; we could have all faith, so that we could remove mountains.  But if we do not have charity, we are nothing!  Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”

Charity then is the third, the most important, indeed the essential component in our preparation for Lent.  With charity, we may see God face to face, without it we are nothing. It is not enough just to see our Lord bleeding and dying in agony upon the Cross, if we have not charity, that is, love for that bleeding dying Saviour, we may as well be watching a movie as we snack on our popcorn.  His suffering demands that we follow him by suffering ourselves.   Nor is it enough just to pray.  The love of God must be behind our prayers, because without that love, our prayers are just sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.  We find ourselves once again hearing the echo of our Lord’s words when he said that the most important commandment we have from God is to love God!  To love him with all our heart and mind and soul and strength.

We must prepare for Lent by fostering this love in ourselves. Only with great love can we make a worthy response to God for the love he showed us on Good Friday.  Only with great love can we be perfectly contrite for our sins, detesting them “because they offend thee, my God, who art all good, and deserving of all my love.”  Let love be the driving force, then, behind our Lenten practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving.  Prayer first: let love drive us to pray to the Lord in thanksgiving for his loving mercy to us, to beseech him that he may heal us of our blind and reckless attachment to sin.  Let us love God simply because he is God, all-perfect and infinitely love-able.  Our fasting comes next.  Let’s make sure we aren’t fasting just because we have to, but because it is our voluntary free-will gift to God of our own will, sacrificed to him out of love.  And finally, let’s not forget our almsgiving, whereby we may show our love for God also to his creatures, our fellow man, our neighbor.  Let’s show our love for God by loving our neighbor, bearing in mind that whatsoever we do to one of these least of our brethren, we do unto God himself.

If we can remember all this, then we are now ready to begin Lent, knowing what we have to do.  Lent is only forty days out of the entire year.  Use this most precious time wisely. By the time Easter arrives we want to be renewed and sanctified Christians.  So let us now go up to Jerusalem, let us embrace our crosses out of love for God, and let us carry them towards our own Good Friday, relying on God’s grace and mercy to give us strength to persevere.