Homily for the 5th Sunday in Lent, April 6, 2025

…since I have indeed been taken possession of by Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:12 

What a wonderful statement uttered by St. Paul! It should become the template of our relationship with Christ. 

There are two basic ways of becoming somebody else’s possession: by being purchased as slaves or as the result of being smitten by love. 

Today, St. Paul tells us how he fell in love with Christ. (Philippians 3:8-14) 

Two people smitten by love desire intensely to be possessed by their beloved. It is as if they forfeit their own will to be always attentive to fulfill their lover’s every desire. This brings them joy and self-realization. 

Do we want to become Jesus’ cherished possession?  

As in the case of St. Paul, this, which should be the aspiration of every genuine Christian, can be achieved only by a gradual identification with Christ crucified. 

After a while of contemplating his crucified Lord, St. Paul could claim something humanly impossible: “yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me.  

Galatians 2:20 

In our case too, we should start by becoming courageously aware of what went on in our heart while we lived in the flesh, and the work of God’s grace as we experience the intensity of his love for us in reliving the passion, death and resurrection of Christ. 

The more we can appreciate the extent of this infinite love and live serenely, trustingly and hope-filled in it, the sooner we will accept the loss of all things and consider them as rubbish. 

Truth be told, the coarse word rendered by the word “rubbish” is actually “human excrements.”  

As God’s grace leads us through the painful stages of the passion and death of Christ, and our hearts are set ablaze by our contemplation of Christ’s love, we should pause occasionally to see how many of the world’s things that shaped our past, we are now willing to toss aside as rubbish. 

Shockingly, one can choose to join a religious order, take the solemn vow of poverty for the wrong reason, to lead a worry-free life with a roof over one’s head, three square meals a day and all the necessities of life assured, instead of choosing such life out of love for Christ. 

The hardest things to toss aside as if they were “human excrements” so as to be gradually possessed by Christ, could be our ideas, our pet peeves, our tendencies to judge and to condemn others, our decision to love and to associate only with those from whom we can profit. 

Mind you, even our way of worshipping God could become something we must toss aside if we find out that we have been deluding ourselves and silencing our conscience by ignoring the challenges of some of the Gospel’s pages. 

This is the spiritually lethal delusion lived by the scribes and Pharisees who, alas, are found in every age of the Church!  

Outwardly, the Pharisees and the scribes were the most devout people of their time; but they were self-absorbed: they loved money; they loved the good things in life and, most of all, they were proud of their ways of worshipping and of their flawless conduct.  

We cannot forget that St. Paul, who rejoiced in being Christ’s cherished possession, in his early years, was a proud Pharisee himself. (Philippians 3:5) 

This most comforting page of the Gospel (John 8:1- 11) displays so very eloquently Jesus’ love even for those scribes and Pharisees who had brought to him a woman caught in the very act of committing adultery. 

Since they, unlike St. Paul, were not aware of the desensitizing effect of their own sins, they could feel very confident in their perceived righteousness to focus on that woman’s obvious sin. 

However, by saying: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” Jesus forced them to explore, perhaps for the first time in a long time, the recesses of their hearts where sin was festering undisturbed.  

That prolonged silent pause was disturbing at first; then, it became unbearable, as awareness of their sins forced them to drop their stones and, one by one, beginning with the elders, they all left. 

The dynamics of freeing ourselves of whatever keeps us away from loving Christ with abandonment, show that there is always a convergence of two people in love: each one of us and the Lord.  

This is God’s ageless plan! 

As this Lenten Season continues, going over our past of sin after an unhurried contemplation of our crucified Lord, is bound to be more thorough because of all the imperfect love we can muster and, thus, it will be done with disarming honesty sustained by a burst of trust in his infinite love for us.  

Once we own up to our past lived in the flesh, the order recorded in today’s 1st reading must be observed lest we fall victims to spiritual paralysis and become unable to do good: Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new! Isaiah 43:18 

Frequent contemplation of our crucified Lord will guarantee that our grief is always sincere, yet such that, far from crushing us, it will spur us to offer our whole self to the power of the Holy Spirit to be part of something new that involves the whole world. 

Eventually, we will realize that what the Lord is making new is such a grandiose design that he alone can accomplish. 

It is the triumph of love brought about also by the participation of countless children of God, who are smitten by love. They have become Christ’s cherished possessions so that their hearts are completely satisfied and filled with a joy which is otherworldly. 

With the help of God’s grace, we desire to experience the same type of joy ourselves.