Second Sunday Of Lent – March 16th, 2025
This past Christmas Eve, the Jubilee year began. Since 1300 AD, the Church has convened a jubilee year every 25 years to renew the call to all people to celebrate God’s mercy. Pope Francis has given this Jubilee Year 2025 the theme “Pilgrims of Hope”. He wants us all to recognize that this world and all that is in it is only temporary. We are on a journey to a life that is greater than this earthly life. This world and all that is in it is passing. Our hope lies in a world that is to come, where there will be no injustice, no suffering, and no more death. As believers in Jesus, it is our mission to share our hope with others – a hope that is founded in God’s unconditional love for us.
Saint Paul echoes this theme in today’s second reading. “But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil 3:20 NRSV). This life that we are looking forward to is a total restoration of the whole world. We won’t just be floating around like clouds, but we will be reunited with our bodies. And our bodies will be glorified so that they can never suffer or die again. That is why Saint Paul assures us, “He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory” (Phil 3: 21 NRSV). All this is possible because Jesus died for us and rose from the dead.
This is the hope our world is in such desperate need of. In today’s society, we are told to live for the day, to live life to the fullest, to “go for it”. And that is all fine and good. But we are never told what it means to live life to the fullest. We are never told what the “it” we need to go for is. So people typically settle for trying to get all the pleasure out of life that they can.
But that inevitably leaves us feeling empty and lost. Also, it leads us to use others for our own purposes, rather than to love and care for them as individuals made in the image and likeness of God.
Our hope that is not based on this world and its passing pleasures. Rather, it is a hope based on the love of God for us that never changes. It is a hope based on the love of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ, the one who loved us enough to die for us.
Even though this hope looks toward Heaven for its ultimate fulfillment, it doesn’t mean that we are not grounded in the realities of this world and its problems. Our faith compels us to get involved in the suffering of this world, not to escape from it. At the same time, we come to it with a new perspective. We see that the suffering of this world is temporary. Those whom we feed today, will one day have bodies that will not feel hunger. The sick whose wounds we tend today will one day have bodies that will not get ill or weak. The naked whom we clothe today will one day be clothed in the glory of God.
The Catholic Church has always been involved in caring for the sick and the poor, providing hope to people even in the remotest places on earth.
Now, I invite Russel to witness to the Church’s initiatives through the CRS Rice Bowl efforts.