Homeland Security - 3rd Sunday of Lent Year C

Ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001 our nation has yearned for security - safety from terrorism and threats to our peace and livelihood. These hopes are certainly important, unless they dominate our thoughts and cause us to forget the commands of God and we come to treat innocent people unjustly. The security of our national homeland is important, but not as important as the security of our eternal homeland of heaven. Today's readings give us pause to reflect upon our eternal security.

The first reading is familiar enough to everyone: Moses encounters God in the burning bush. God has heard the suffering prayers of his people and has come to rescue them from the slavery of Egypt. Moses no doubt was overjoyed at that part of the theophany, but Moses was not prepared for what would come in the future. Nevertheless, he trusted entirely in God and accepted the mission of liberating God's people from captivity and leading them to the Promised Land. We know the rest of the story: the Israelites will not be faithful to God, and God will abandon them to their own devices. Unless we remain faithful to God as Moses did, we will fall into the same fate.

St. Paul repeats that message to a generation of Christians who felt secure in their salvation. The Corinthian community had the idea that since they had faith and accepted Jesus as their Savior that they could live as they pleased. Paul writes to them in order to correct them of that notion. Yes, we are privileged people for having Christ and His sacraments available to us, but our lives must reflect the faith we claim to profess. As a noted spiritual writer put it, "To belong to God's people, to have access to the living water of grace, the spiritual food of the Eucharist, and all other sacraments is no guarantee of salvation if we do not embark upon an intense effort at conversion and total adherence to God. No one can take this for granted, neither in virtue of his position in the Church, nor on the basis of his own virtues or good service rendered" (Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene, O.C.D., Divine Intimacy, vol. 2, p. 52).

The message of Jesus in the Gospel text continues the same theme. Jesus gives two examples from his own times to teach this lesson to the crowd. The crowd believed that these calamities occurred to the Galileans because their sinfulness was worse than others. Jesus corrects that notion and forces us to accept a truth difficult to accept: there is only one conscience we are fit to examine and it is our own. Only God knows fully the hearts of another person, and while we may see individual acts of others as damning to that person, Jesus wants our focus to be on our own sins and not those of others. Each one of us has plenty of chores to do in his or her own house; we need not look for work in another's.

To bear abundant fruit we must deny ourselves, sacrifice our own preferences to serve others, and to accept the cross of Christ and die daily to ourselves. As Pope Paul VI taught, "What would become of a Gospel, of a Christianity, without the Cross, without pain, without the sacrifice of pain? It would be a gospel, a Christianity, without Redemption, with no Salvatio: a Redemption and Salvation of which - and we ought to recognize it with unmitigated sincerity - we stand in absolute need. The Lord has saved us with the Cross; with his death. He has given us hope again, the right to life" (Pope Paul VI, Address, March 24, 1967).

Our salvation - our eternal homeland security - rests upon hope, which the Catechism states, "responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men's activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement, it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity" (CCC, #1818). May our prayer this week be that of holy Mass today: "God of all compassion, Father of all goodness, to heal the wounds our sins and selfishness bring upon us you bid turn to fasting, prayer, and sharing with our brothers. We acknowledge our sinfulness, our guilt is ever before us; when our weakness causes us discouragement, let your compassion fill us with hope and lead us through a Lent of repentance to the beauty of Easter joy. We ask this through Christ our Lord."