The Gospel for the Fifth Sunday of Lent captures the fundamental paradox of Jesus’ life and preaching.
“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.” (John 12: 24-25)
In many instances and using various images, the Lord keeps telling us: If you want to be great, become little. If you want to be first, be last. If you want to truly live, die to yourself. If you want the glory of Heaven, embrace the shame of the cross.
This way of the Gospel is a hard and mysterious path, indeed, sheer nonsense or madness to those who think in worldly terms.
The unredeemed self seeks its own safety, comfort, interests, and pleasures.
Our culture equates a successful life with wealth, possessions, power, and beauty. Jesus offers a radically different path, promising hardship, renunciation, sacrifice, and the Cross to those who choose to follow Him.
These two world views are so opposed to each other that it bears exploring the rationale for embracing a Christian life.
Loving God and others
As believers in Christ, we Catholics are convinced that the human person is made for self-gift, that the only way we can become fully ourselves, to experience joy, love, communion, and indeed salvation, is to open ourselves fully to the Other, that Other being both God Himself and other people.
We are hard-wired for relationship, which means that possessions, comfort, power, beauty, or wealth can never satisfy the longings of our hearts.
The life this world offers can never deliver on its promises of happiness and satisfaction.
When we realize this truth, opening ourselves up to God and other people in a love that gives itself away, we are surprised by joy, fulfillment, and peace.
Happiness is a by-product of a life handed over in charity; if we make personal happiness our goal in life, paradoxically, we will never find it, because the focus is still on ourselves.
Love calls us out of the narrow confines of our selfishness, and sets us on a path of sacrifice, whereby we discover the great secret of the Gospel: The good life is marked by service, generosity, suffering, and death to the false self, as we strive to love God with all of our heart, will, strength, and mind.
How else could the martyrs of our beloved Church have gone to their terrible deaths with a joy that usually marks a wedding feast?
The importance of fasting
In this context, fasting takes on a particular significance.
Refraining from food or anything else that gives us pleasure, we discipline our bodies and wills to seek the Lord, to empty ourselves out of comfort and complacency, to leave more space for God to act within us, and to take up His abode within our soul through the wonder of sanctifying grace.
In a life cluttered with self, a bloated spirit, a selfish heart, the Lord finds no room to sit down and converse with us, because our inflated ego is using up all the oxygen in the room.
Fasting throws our false ego in the dumpster, so that our true self, the one God knows and loves as a beloved daughter or son, can live in the radiance of the divine.
When I did mission work in the Dominican Republic, I was always powerfully struck on Ash Wednesday as we talked about fasting and sacrifice, because many of the people in our communities ate once or twice a day at most, lived in a poverty year-round that I initially could not even imagine, and were confined by the circumstances of their lives to embrace hardships which make our most daunting Lent look tremendously complacent.
In this context, our small acts of fasting and penance put us in touch with our hungry, poor, and suffering brothers and sisters around the globe, and should move us to help.
Every year, I give up coffee because it is the hardest thing for me.
Does God care that I am going off caffeine for 45 days? Does that impress Him? Probably not, but it helps me to focus on Him.
When I crave a cup of java, I remember that I can live without coffee, but I can’t live without God.
I need to reach for prayer, the Bible, the Rosary, and charitable actions more naturally and easily than I run to the coffee pot for a fresh infusion of energy.
This refusal of innocent comforts strengthens my will for the discipline and sacrifice of the Christian struggle for holiness, as we battle the Evil One and the false self so that we can rise with the Lord this Easter with mind and heart renewed!