The Reality of Christ’s Humanity

User's Guide to Sunday, March 22

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Sunday, March 22, is the Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year B).

 

Feast Days

March 25 is the Solemnity of the Annunciation. It commemorates the day the angel Gabriel invited the Virgin Mary to be the mother of God. The day is exactly nine months before Christmas, and the day is celebrated as the International Day of the Unborn. Pray the Joyful Mysteries today.

 

Mass Readings

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:3-4, 12-15; Hebrews 5:7-9; John 12:20-33

 

Our Take

This Sunday’s readings are about the reality of Christ’s humanity — an important lesson as we move closer to the Passion.

Jesus Christ was both man and God, but for redemption to work, he could not simply conquer through divine strength. He had to triumph as man.

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, quoting the Second Vatican Council: “The Son of God ... worked with human hands; he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart, he loved. Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin” (470).

He was one person, and that person was God the Son. His human intellect and will were “perfectly attuned” to his divine intellect and divine will, “which he had in common with the other Persons of the Trinity” (482).

It is a mystery that is not easy for us to understand, but today’s Gospel shows how it worked in reality.

Jesus describes his passion to Greek visitors, saying he must fall and die like a grain of wheat.

How does he feel about what is about to happen to him? “I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”

You can hear in that sentence the God-man is facing a difficult human trial, but his human will is aligning with his divine will. The second reading explains the same phenomenon:

“In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears. … Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered; and … became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”

We will hear his loud, tearful cries on Good Friday: “I thirst”; “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”; and “It is finished.”

Not only did Jesus Christ experience the weakness and suffering of a human being; he suffered worse. He carried all of the sin of mankind — every sin committed by each of us and by generations of sinners.

That he stayed faithful in and through it is a beautiful gift to each of us.

But apart from simply being grateful for Christ’s gift, this is a gift that carries a great responsibility along with it.

In the first reading, from Jeremiah, we hear about the new covenant God will make with his people: He will write his commandments on their hearts.

We are that people. We are in that new covenant. In baptism, God did what he promised he would do: He wrote his commandments on our hearts, and we need to be able to align our wills with them, like Jesus does with the Father.

That is the gift of fortitude: the courage to do the Father’s will, no matter what; being faithful to the commandments not just when things are going well, but when they are going badly.

“The Letter to the Hebrews expresses in dramatic terms how the prayer of Jesus accomplished the victory of salvation,” says the Catechism.

Now, we have to pray to participate in it: prayer that makes his commandments not just an external commitment, but the bedrock of our hearts that we insist on following, no matter what.

 

Tom and April Hoopes write from Atchison, Kansas,

where Tom is writer in residence at Benedictine College.

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