Passion Sunday 26 Mar 2023 Sermon

 

Passion Sunday 26 March 2023 Contradiction

 

Our Lord offers a choice – to believe in Him or not.

 

We can go with the heavenly witness (Christ) and see it all make sense; or we can go the worldly way and try to kill Our Lord, like the unjust tenants (Mt 21, 33-43)

 

What do you have left when you have killed the Son?

 

Some who opposed Our Lord would have been sincere in trying to do the best thing; others were past caring if they were right or wrong. They wanted to get rid of Him at any price.

 

We notice a real hatred of religion in general, and in particular the Catholic faith.

 

People hate it because it disturbs their consciences; they are afraid it might be true, and if so it is not convenient for them.

 

People reject the Church because it offers the wrong sort of happiness, one which requires restraint, and is not always immediate. Whereas worldly happiness is instant and does not require discipline.

 

Jesus was popular as a Saviour when He worked miracles but not when He made moral demands. He came for the whole world and generally the world did not want to know. (And His own did not know Him, Jn 1, 11.)

 

And they did not like His method of setting things right – the Cross.

 

What sort of a religion would begin by asking its members to take up the cross and be prepared to wait a long time for any reward?

 

So they set about destroying the very thing that would save them.

 

It is a trademark of the devil that he will get people to shoot themselves in the foot, that they will reject what they need most.

 

We must go by Christ’s way. If there is something we do not like about present arrangements we must come to terms with that, but we cannot re-design God.

 

If we distance ourselves from Christ it will bring us only spiritual death.

 

God knows that we find it hard to sort out the true and the false. He will help us unravel the false attachments and the confusion of ideas.

 

We come into a world where there is massive dispute  about just about everything.

 

It is tempting to throw it all in and just embrace a life of pleasure.

 

That is the equivalent of ‘killing the Son’; only less directly. If we ignore what He has done we are ‘killing’ Him as far as impeding Him from saving us.

 

If the human race had simply received Him there would be no need for sacrifice.

 

Instead He had to go a longer way about, and become the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world.

 

Come and kill Me and then submit to Me as Lord!

 

We prepare to relive the weeks of our Lord’s passion and death, and learn as much as we can. We seek not just mental learning, but from the heart.

 

We will share His sacrifice for the sake of a greater good. We will not object that it is too hard, but focus our energy on achieving it, with a lot of help from Heaven.

 

We accept the Church and our place in it; we thank God for a clear witness in spite of all the false lights.

 

Some will hold on to their hatred, but we hope that many will convert, as they did on Pentecost morning (Acts 2,41).

 

We have only one Saviour for the whole world, transcending any other ways that people would classify themselves. No more Jew or Greek (Ga 3,28).

 

We accept where others reject, love where others hate. We will follow Him to Calvary and then to eternal glory.