3rd Sunday of Lent – B 

As we enter into the third week of Lent, we might take some time to reflect on where we have been and where we are going in this holy season.

Beginning with Ash Wednesday, the first two weeks of Lent seem to be a time that focuses on what we are doing during this forty-day season of the year. Our thoughts turn to prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, to sacrifice and self-denial, and our Sunday gospel readings focus our attention on our journey through the desert and the glory that awaits us at the end of the journey.

The last two weeks of Lent, which include Holy Week and the great feasts of the Easter Triduum, focus our attention on what Jesus has done for us. Our attention is drawn in a very significant way to the events of the last days and weeks of Jesus' life here on earth – His persecution by the Pharisees and chief priests and the scribes, His arrest, His suffering and death, and, of course, His resurrection from the dead.

But this week and next we are somewhere in the middle, in a time of transition, or perhaps if we can resist the temptation to see life only as a series of events that require transition from one to the next, perhaps we can see the third and fourth weeks of Lent as a time simply to come to know who Jesus is better. For these next two weeks, maybe our focus should not necessarily be on what we do or what Jesus does, but maybe our attention could be on who we are and who Jesus is for us.

Our gospel seems to be pointing us in that direction today – not so much by its major theme, the expulsion of the money-changers from the temple, but more by a small detail that is included only briefly at the end. The gospel tells us today that “Jesus did not need anyone to testify about human nature. He Himself understood it very well.”

Although this statement may seem very obvious at first, it is worth pausing to consider its meaning a bit more deeply. Jesus understood our human nature because He shared it with us. He shared our physical nature, our hungers and thirsts, our aches and pains, our fatigue and our illnesses. He shared our emotional nature, our joys and hopes, our fears and our sorrows, our frustrations and our failures, our love and our peace. Jesus shared our spiritual nature, our longing for communion with God, our longing for friendship with others, our sadness in times of loss, our pain in times of betrayal, our happiness in the successes and joys of the people we love.

Jesus also knew the shortcomings of all of us with whom He shared our human nature. Although He Himself never committed any sin, he knew that human beings were capable of being greedy, angry, envious, lazy, lustful, gluttonous, and prideful.

Jesus knew human nature very well – so how can we come to a deeper knowledge of who Jesus is during these third and fourth weeks of Lent?

We know that Jesus was a teacher who affirmed the importance of every one of the ten commandments given by God to His people as we heard in our first reading today. We know too that Jesus taught further that it is not enough to simply live by these commandments in order to be saved, we ought also to live them in a spirit of love. Love is the fulfillment of the law, and Jesus taught us that to love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves was the greatest of all the commandments of God.

Jesus also revealed Himself as one willing to lay down His life for our salvation, as one willing to have the temple of His body destroyed and three days later rise as the sacrifice to be offered for the forgiveness of our sins.

Such teaching was scandalous to the Jewish people and an absurdity to the Greeks. It was a scandal to those who believed they had cornered the market on true religion and an absurdity to those who believed they had cornered the market on worldly wisdom. But for us who believe, Jesus is the power of God and the wisdom of God.

During these next two middle weeks of Lent, as we continue our own prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and as we begin to anticipate the days when we see the great love of the Lord revealed in the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus, let us also take some time simply to come to know more deeply who Jesus is as the power and wisdom of God revealed in our lives.

Jesus indicates quite clearly that He understands our human nature very well. Let us make the effort during these coming weeks to try to understand His divine nature better, especially as He reveals Himself to be the love of God present in our lives each day.

Thomas P. Ferguson
March 19, 2006