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3/14 - 4th Week of Lent
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The Fourth Sunday of Lent is called Lætare (Rejoice) Sunday, from the first words of the opening antiphon of today’s liturgy. Since this Sunday occurs in the middle of Lent, as Gaudete Sunday is celebrated midway through Advent, Lætare Sunday reminds us of the Event we look forward to at the end of the Lenten season. As on Gaudete Sunday, rose-colored vestments replace violet. In Lent, these outward signs symbolize the Church’s joy in anticipation of the Resurrection, a joy which cannot be contained even in this penitential Season, though we still refrain from Alleluias and the singing of the Gloria until the magnificence of the Easter Vigil.
You do not have to be an alcoholic or be present at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (AA) to recognize that the famous twelve steps of AA reflect the essentials of the human experience of redemption. It is all there: the profound awareness of need for rescue by Another; the abandonment of self to God; the admission of one’s own vulnerability and responsibility for the moral harm of one’s behavior; commitment to prayer, reflection, and outreach to others. The fact that the twelve steps are a “we” statement in the past tense testifies that it is an expression of a community which shares the experience of the healing power of rescue from evil by a caring God. That makes it a kind of Credo or confession of Faith. More accurately, it is a proclamation of sacred history: Here’s how God has acted in our lives. AA’s twelve steps can help us get to the heart of this Sunday’s readings. The first reading tells us how God has worked through Cyrus to rescue the Babylonian exiles from exile and “restore them to sanity” by bringing them home. The same sense of rescue by “a Power greater than ourselves” is spelled out powerfully in the passage from Ephesians. Like the twelve steps of AA, this passage is the celebration of a community who have “turned their will and lives over to the care of God as they have come to know him” in Christ Jesus.
The Gospel passage for this Sunday is another classic confession of Christian experience of Divine ‘rescue operation’ in the person of Jesus. Nicodemus learns that, like Moses’ bronze serpent, Jesus, too, must be “lifted up” (a contemporary euphemism for being crucified), and that the act of His being “lifted up” will similarly bring about salvation. John 3:16 is probably the best loved verse in the Bible and it has been called “everybody’s text” and the “Gospel of the Gospels.” “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” This is the summary of the Gospel message of salvation through Christ Jesus. It tells us that the God takes the initiative in all salvation because of His love for man. We only need to surrender, trust him and allow ourselves to be loved and rescued. As St. Augustine puts it: “God loves each one of us as if there were only one of us to love. It is our God who brings us to greater belief in our daily struggles and temptations, and leads us to eternal life, thus demonstrating the depth of His love for us.”