Homily from the Parish Priest for the Fifth Sunday in Lent
Readings for Year B: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 5:7-9; John 12:20-33
A few weeks ago our provincial superior Fr Damian and our archbishop Cardinal Vincent wrote an open letter the Government of India regarding one of our Jesuit brothers Fr Stan Swamy. Fr Stan is an 83-year-old Jesuit priest who has been working throughout his life for human rights in India, challenging especially the injustice of the Indian caste system. Fr Stan’s case is one which has also attracted the attention of our Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a gross injustice. Between July and August 2020 Fr Stan was interrogated multiple times for over 15 hours about an event that preceded the violence between Dalits and Marathas near Pune in 2017. He had been falsely accused of having personal links with banned extremist groups. Although the evidence for the link was not forthcoming Fr Stan was convicted and imprisoned. Fr Damian and Cardinal Vincent wrote: “On this day, Republic Day in India, we draw attention to the fate of Fr Stan Swamy, an 83-year-old Jesuit Catholic priest, who has been imprisoned for more than 100 days on completely unfounded charges of terrorism. Fr Swamy has committed his life to working for the Constitutional rights of the most impoverished and marginalised people in India. Many Jesuits have already given their lives in this cause. Fr Swamy suffers from Parkinson’s disease and needs help with eating and dressing. He is now at grave risk of contracting COVID in an over-crowded prison in Mumbai”. UN representatives have also expressed concern about the arbitrary arrest of Fr Swamy and the way in which the Indian state is seeking to delegitimise his peaceful work for human rights.
Fr Stan himself is reported to have taken his imprisonment as part of the course of events when one is falsely accused. His suffering, his passion, flies in the face of justice and cries out to God for mercy, yet also speaks to me of where we see the suffering Christ in our very midst. It is here in the dark places, in the prisons humanity creates, in the suffering of those unjustly treated, persecuted, in the midst of the inequality that pervades our society, that we often find the Jesus of the Gospel. This Sunday is an important step in our journey towards Easter as we prepare to embrace the narrative again of who God is in our world. The God who comes to us as the suffering servant who has written his law into our hearts yet which we reject in our selfishness, our tribalism, through all the ways we seek to polarise peoples both within and without the Church rather than build bridges, fight for justice, create spaces where all our welcomed and all can belong, regardless of caste, class, race, sexual orientation, gender, education, whatever background at all. In the passion of Jesus who gives himself to all peoples on the cross, and not just for the few, we embrace the heart of what it is to be Catholic and authentically human.
Today we hear the Greeks ask “let us see Jesus”. It is not the Jews but those outside the circle of religious tradition who ask. And I think that begs a question for all of us: who in our own everyday lives is looking for Jesus? They may not be asking directly about faith but in indirect ways do I know friends, colleagues, whoever, who may be searching, perhaps in the most unusual places? Who may be looking for something more in life? For whom the pandemic has been a line in the sand where we see the world cannot continue in this way, where we plunder its resources, still proliferate nuclear weapons as the ultimate insurance – for whom we might ask? – where we look into ourselves and our comfort rather than outwards to welcome the stranger and the outcast. How do we respond to the many who are searching for spirituality, for God, for meaning in life, who want to belong and then to be invited to embrace what we believe and how we are taught in the Gospel to behave? Maybe not as dramatically as Fr Stan in showing the face of Christ but we can do so in many ways through how we are witnesses of everything Jesus is about.
But the real gift which sets us on the road to discipleship is surely recognizing Christ in the world ourselves. In fact the God made human is under our noses if we look carefully, if we discern his presence. This is what the Greeks led by Philip were learning to discern – and it took great courage to discover it. But of course they cannot know it fully at this stage of the Gospel story – we know the answer to the question “where is Jesus?” will only be revealed in the passion and cross of Christ because here we see what God is all about – self-sacrifice, infinite love, the perfect model of being human.
And so the Gospel today invites us to ask ourselves where Jesus is in our own lives and to prepare ourselves to embrace the mystery again of his full revelation, the full revealing of who the God made human in our world is – through the events of his final suffering, death on the cross and rising to new life, which these last two weeks leading to Easter show us again as at the heart of our Christian faith.
Fr Dominic Robinson SJ