Readings of the day: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:3-4, 12-13, 14-15; Hebrews 5:7-9; John 12:20-33
This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
What would we think if I said, “The days are surely coming”; that some event or great news we have been looking forward to, maybe for a long time, was imminent? What if God were to say this to us, or somebody we think of as a prophet—like Jeremiah was to ancient Israel, but in our own time—or a person otherwise in a position of authority were to announce to us, “The days are surely coming”?
“The days are surely coming, says the LORD” through his prophet Jeremiah and to us anew today! I wonder, though, how the people who heard Jeremiah in their time announce this to them felt at first. Would they have been especially excited or joyful? Would they have wondered what this “new covenant” God was announcing through Jeremiah meant? Would they have felt guilty for their sins as a people since, as we hear from Jeremiah, the very reason God was proclaiming a “new covenant” with Israel was that Israel had broken the first covenant with God? Israel, God’s people, had been unfaithful to God, in a way similar to when there is infidelity between spouses in a marriage. But would the people of Israel, when they heard Jeremiah’s promise of “a new covenant” between them and God, been all the more resolved not to remain paralyzed by their guilt, but to repent?
Maybe many of them would have thought Jeremiah to be too dramatic and simply ignored him or become irritated by him (after all, Jeremiah is known among the Old Testament prophets to have been especially dramatic, fiery, even angry in his speech). Many may have been moved by Jeremiah’s tireless passion to listen to his announcement of this “new covenant” between them and God. More than likely, ancient Israel’s initial responses to Jeremiah’s announcement of “the days… surely coming” were a bit of “all of the above.”
“The days are surely coming”! How do we continue to hear and discern this message in our time? For about a year now, since the first COVID-19 control measures started, I have been praying Evening Prayer over Zoom every day with a group of relatives and friends from different places where I have ministered as a priest. Within the last few weeks, people in our prayer group have announced and been receiving doses of the vaccines against COVID-19. And, this past week, [one of our Basilian confrères in our house], whom many of us may know from his time at St. Joseph’s College, was so excited that he was finally able to book an appointment to receive a vaccine.
I was and am so happy for him! I could not help think of God’s first words to the people of Israel through Jeremiah in today’s reading: “The days are surely coming”! The days are surely coming when this pandemic will be in the past; a memory. The days are surely coming when we will be able to gather safely in our chapels at St. Joseph’s College for Mass. The days are surely coming when COVID-related restrictions on in-person attendance at Masses will be relaxed and then be no more; when we will be able to celebrate Eucharist and other sacraments freely, without anxiety about becoming sick, and as the health and nourishment of our souls, minds, and bodies requires.
These “days are surely coming”; this gives me great hope, and I cannot wait to welcome all of us, St. Joseph’s College’s worshipping community; faculty; students; staff colleagues, back to in-person worship; classes; prayer and work at our College as soon as we are able. “The days are surely coming” and, may I say, the days are already upon us (and not only because we have weathered a pandemic) when we have acquired an acute sense of Christ-like service to and prayer for anybody in need; anybody who is especially poor or disadvantaged, or simply anybody who longs (as we do) to gather together in one worship space to pray; hear God’s Word; sing; take, bless, break, and eat the bread that becomes Christ’s body, given for us and for our salvation, together. I am deeply grateful and joyful, sisters and brothers, whenever I look upon our community of faith here at St. Joseph’s College, whether (for now) in little insets in a Zoom window or (in not too long, we pray) in our College chapels, halls, offices, and classrooms.
“The days are surely coming” or, as Jesus says in John’s Gospel today, “The hour has come.” Now, when Jesus says in our Gospel, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” is this not a rather ominous reference to “the death he was to die”? Once again (Fr. Jim spoke a bit about this last Sunday), John’s Gospel today repeats Jesus’ connection between his being raised on the cross and the bronze serpent in Moses’ time being raised on a pole to heal the people of poisonous snakebites.
The crowd of Greeks who approach the Apostle Philip at the beginning of our Gospel today simply “wish to see Jesus.” I imagine this crowd is a lot like us: We, too, simply and nobly, “wish to see Jesus.” My prayer for us, sisters and brothers, is that our simple and noble “wish to see Jesus,” to worship and receive Jesus in the Eucharist, be granted very soon; that this “hour has come”; that at least those “days are surely coming” for us. Yet the crowds’ “wish to see Jesus” in John’s Gospel is met not with immediate consolation but with Jesus’ unsettling, even morbid at first hearing, reference to his approaching death on a cross.
And Jesus says that, for us to be in any way like him—like whom we are called to be through our baptism—means that we, too, will have a share in his passion and death. We, too, will be like the “grain of wheat [that] falls into the earth and dies.” If not, we will “remain just a single grain” but, to the extent we share in Jesus’ passion and death, we, like the grain of wheat that dies, will spring from the earth and “bear much fruit.”
My sisters and brothers in Christ, I feel impelled to think, with Christian hope, that we have been through a “grain of wheat” experience for a long while now. And, as the Lord knows, certainly better than me, many if not all of us have been through maybe several “grain of wheat” experiences in our lives: Maybe we have been ill, or a loved one or friend has experienced illness. Maybe we have loved ones who have died. Maybe we have served among the poor or those who lack basic necessities, or been in those situations ourselves. May any of us who have ever suffered know the Lord’s solidarity with you in your suffering. Today, we hear from the Letter to the Hebrews, the same reading we will hear again on Good Friday, of Jesus who “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death.”
These same “prayers and supplications… loud cries and tears” Jesus now offers for all who suffer in any way; for all who, simply and nobly, “wish to see Jesus”; for all who long to be able to gather and worship in one space again soon, to take, bless, break, and eat the bread that becomes for us the Body of Christ, together in person again; for all of us who have experienced and continue to experience in mind, body, or spirit, what Jesus meant when he referred to the “grain of wheat” that must fall “into the earth” and die, in order to bear “much fruit” and “keep it for eternal life.”
With Jesus’ solidarity with us in times of suffering; privation; isolation, we are and will be the grains of wheat that spring from the earth and give it and one another life and joy. Already we sense the signs that those “days are surely coming.” In and through Christ’s passion and death, which we know by faith will end in the joy of resurrection, for us as once for Jesus, our “hour has come,” for our good and God’s glory forever.
