March 2024 Allocutio

Allocutio March 2024. By Fr. Benjamin Saliba.

Homily-5th Sunday of Lent17th March2024.

When I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men to myself. For anyone who looks upon the Son of Man, who believes and follows his way will be saved. This imagery of drawing all men to Jesus is enriched by our very first reading today whereby as the Prophet Jeremiah says, it will not be like the covenant of old, rather it will be deep within the hearts of all mankind that God will place His Law. There will be no need for neighbour to try and teach neighbour, or brother to say to brother, Learn to know the Lord.

Jesus is THE manifestation of God the Father, because he and the Father are one. It is Jesus who reveals the heart of man to himself. No longer can you and I walk around and plead ignorance. The great gift that Jesus has left us is his bride the Church, protected and nurtured throughout history by the Holy Spirit, an advocate for our faith and teachings. It is through the Church that clean hearts can be made – through Baptism, through sacramental confession. The heart can be strengthened and more attuned to the Law of God by frequent and worthy reception of Holy Communion.

It will then be by our manner of life that we will evangelise and introduce to the world our love of God and the message of repentance and conversion of heart. The alternative, as we have seen in readings in weeks gone by, is destruction and death. When we turn away from God, when we prefer vice to virtue, evil to good – we will be bitten by the fiery serpents of our modern day. When we look to the son who is lifted up – we are faced with the reality of our sinfulness and the only option to come out of that sinfulness is to proclaim Jesus as Lord and repent of our ways.

St Paul beautifully depicts the love Jesus has for his Father in heaven and for us, as during his life on earth, Christ offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the one who had the power to save him out of death, and he submitted so humbly that his prayer was heard. Here, brothers and sisters, is a beautiful insight into the type of relationship Jesus has with his Father and a powerful example of how we should be before our Lord and God. 

Many of us do not want to submit – do not want to show humility. Partly because of a social contagion, whereby pride and power always win the cultural narrative, but when you actually scratch the surface, humble submission is avoided because we all know what it contains – an amendment of life, a scrapping of ideologies not grounded in Truth, a conversion of the way we live – physically and mentally, and a vulnerability to allow a love so powerful into our lives that we are scared of what it might do to us – it might point young men in the direction of the priesthood, young women in the direction of religious or consecrated life, married couples to have more children,