“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”(Psalm 22:1)

This poignant, excruciating cry from the responsorial psalm for this Sunday, Palm/Passion Sunday is echoed by Jesus from the cross during the narration of the Passion during the same liturgy.

Perhaps there are some amongst us, faithful believers, who are nonetheless seeing this present coronavirus, as a sign that God has indeed “forsaken” or abandoned us.  Are we being punished for our sins, and the sins of all the world?  Such thoughts can plague us as we hear, day by day of an increase in the number of coronavirus cases, and deaths, including priests, doctors and nurses. 

We need to remember that, in Jewish liturgy, to proclaim the first line of a psalm, meant to proclaim the whole psalm.  Psalm 2 does begin with a sobering declaration: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  It does go on to speak of the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual agonies undergone by the psalmist: “My hands and feet have shriveled /I can count all my bones” and “all who see me mock at me, they make mouths at me, they shake their heads’ and “they divide my clothes among themselves and for my clothing they cast lots.”  But the psalm itself concludes with a mighty declaration of trust and faith in God: “In the midst of the congregation I will praise you /glorify him, stand in awe of him!”

All the readings during this Sunday’s liturgy, which is Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday, speak of how suffering and death lead to resurrection and triumph.  This is the God-intended, Scripture-ordained, path for God’s Anointed One, His Messiah, Jesus Christ.  We cannot hope to emulate Christ and be His faithful disciple, if we are unwilling to take up our own cross, which may be the fear and uncertainty we are feeling right now in the midst of the coronavirus, or even suffering the symptoms of the virus ourselves.  The pangs of doubt, of anxiety, the sufferings attendant on not being able to get to Mass or even enter our parish church to pray, all of these are the stuff of sacrifice and surrender, the things we hand over to God and ask him to join with the sufferings of his beloved Son, Jesus, fulfilling St Paul’s own words from his letter to Colossians: “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” 

This is the path all the saints followed, in imitation of Jesus, the path by which they ascended to holiness, the path by which you and I, too, are called to follow. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?  Or what will they give in return for their life?” (Matthew 16:24-26)

I wish you a blessed and spiritually fruitful Holy Week!!

Here is Fr. Bob Poole’s Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent.

‘And Jesus wept’ This verse, the shortest in all the gospels, is found in our gospel passage from John 11 this weekend, Jesus weeps as he sees all the mourners around the tomb of his good friend, Lazarus, who had died four days ago.  Jesus deliberately kept away from visiting Lazarus as he was dying, even though Lazarus’ sisters, Martha and Mary, had pleaded with him to come and save their brother from dying.  This was in part due to the political situation, with many of the authorities on the look-out for Jesus, to arrest him.  But it was also due to the fact that Jesus wanted to prove to everyone that nothing, not even death, was stronger than He.  He knew that he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, he was confident in his power to save, yet he also wept at the tomb of his good friend, to show us that death is a part of life, and must be accepted, but it also is not the end of life.  As the first Preface for the Dead in our Eucharistic Prayers for Mass declares: “Lord, for your faithful, life is changed, not ended.”|

Changed, not ended.  Jesus is greater than death, greater than sickness, and, yes, greater than the coronavirus.  This is a time for us, not to run away through fear from the virus, but to stand up to it, and pray to the Lord, for him to overcome this epidemic, believing that he can even raise people from the dead.  Even though we are in lock-down mode right now, there is nothing stopping us going into prayers of intercession and spiritual warfare, agreeing to pray together at a certain time and day the rosary, or the Divine Mercy, or whatever, even if we have to be in our own homes while we are doing it.  The Bible, the Word of God, is a “living power for those who believe” and we can, and should, declare it aloud during our prayer times, especially Scriptures like Psalm 91, which speak of the protection of God, or 2 Corinthians 20, which speaks of the victory of the people of God over an overwhelming enemy, because “the battle is not yours, but God’s” (v.15) , or Acts 4: 23-31, where the early Church prays to God for deliverance and boldness against the forces seeking to destroy them, and “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with all boldness” (v. 31).

We are not “in the flesh,” i.e. weak and helpless human beings, but we “are in the Spirit” because “the Spirit of God dwells in you,” as our second reading from St Paul’s letter to the Romans this weekend tells us.  Let us start to agree together in prayer, to lift up our voices in a united prophetic declaration, as illustrated in our first reading this weekend from the prophet Ezekiel.  Let us call upon God to “open our graves” of fear, and discouragement and despair and raise us up as people of faith and trust in God, and boldness through the power of the Spirit.”  Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life, as he declares to Martha in our gospel today, before challenging her  “Do you believe this?”

Do you believe this, brothers and sisters, do I?