Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year B 

Jeremiah 31:31–34

Psalm 51:3–4, 12–13, 14–15

Hebrews 5:7–9

John 12:20–33

New life comes from a renewed experience of relationship. When we are made one with others by such relationships, we learn more about ourselves and we grow. It is not that we become something different. Rather, we delve more deeply into our own identity. A friend in the seminary years ago made a comment that has stayed with me, and I see it as a great mystical truth: “People never change. They only become more themselves.”

Jeremiah 31 presents God’s promise of a new relationship with his people. The new covenant is an invitation to the people of God who have been in a broken relationship with God due to their infidelity to hope for a new experience. God promises to make them capable of living in a right relationship with him, a relationship that includes a new heart.  

The new covenant will be intimate and personal, offering a way of connecting with God unique to each soul: “I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the Lord. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the Lord, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.”

The Gospel takes up the theme of the Fifth Sunday of Advent, new life. Jesus shares with His disciples the paradoxical truth: Suffering and death lead to glory and eternal life. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.”

The themes of thirst, light and life that have been highlighted over the past few weeks now come together to move us to a realization of who Jesus is as the one who fulfills our longings, the one who heals our blindness and enables us to see clearly what God is doing, and the one who offers his own life so as to take us with him into the mystery of eternity. Next week, we will plunge into Holy Week and the full celebration of the “flow” of these themes in the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord.

The mystery of the passion of the Lord is an invitation to us to allow God to plunge us into Christ Himself. The new covenant will be accomplished in his blood. The glorification of the Son of Man, Jesus, is the gift to humanity of salvation through the willingness of this one man to give his life for us. He is the grain of wheat that falls and dies and produces much fruit.

The Diocese of Columbus offers two special events as holy week begins: Monday evening, Confessions offered in parishes throughout the diocese so that any who have not yet approached the sacrament of reconciliation may do so. Tuesday afternoon, the Chrism Mass at which the priests renew their commitment and the holy oils to be used in the next year in the celebration of the sacraments. Parishes will celebrate the Sacred Triduum: Holy Thursday, the Mass of the Lord’s Supper; Good Friday, the memorial of the Passion of the Lord, Holy Saturday, the Solemn Vigil of Easter, and Easter Sunday, the Masses of the Resurrection of the Lord.  

As the season of Lent comes to its close, we now experience the “high holy days” of our Catholic faith. May we open our hearts to the grace that is offered, praying “Create a clean heart in me, O God.”