4th Sunday of Lent 2024
2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23; Psalm 136 (137); Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21
I think I must be slightly gormless. (“What do you mean SLIGHTLY?” I hear you cry.) For the life of me, I cannot see any connection between the First Reading and Psalm on the one hand, and the Second Reading and Gospel on the other.
As you are no doubt aware, the Old Testament Reading is normally chosen to link with the Gospel, whilst, in Ordinary Time, the Second Reading follows a New Testament Epistle week by week. During Advent, Lent, and Eastertide, all three readings tend to be connected. So where is the connection here?
Clearly, the Reading from the Second Book of Chronicles is complemented by the Psalm. Both refer to the Exile of the Jewish people to Babylon, an Exile which lasted seventy years until Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon in 538BC, and allowed the exiled people to return home.
Actually, it wouldn’t have been a return. After seventy years, most if not all of the original exiles would have been dead, and this would have been a journey to a homeland which the people involved knew only by hearsay. Nevertheless, the longing for home was etched deeply into them, and the liberation from the Exile was celebrated as enthusiastically as the original Exodus from Egypt.
The Psalm is a lament by the exiles before the prospect of return had been opened up to them. It is a beautiful piece of poetry, the only psalm to have reached the top of the popular music charts (Boney M’s version from 1978) but it has an unsavoury ending. The final two verses read “O Babylon, destroyer, blessed is he who repays you the ills you brought on us. He shall seize and shall dash your children on the rock.” Needless to say, those verses are not used in the liturgy.
We can see that this reading and psalm record an extremely important episode in the history of God’s chosen people, and they should rouse us to prayer today. Babylon is situated in modern day Iraq, still in turmoil, a turmoil which has persisted largely since the country was carved out by the Western powers in the wake of the First World War. Persia is now Iran, another country desperately in need of prayers, while the whole Israel/Palestine dilemma cries to heaven for a just and humane solution, a solution which, in human terms seems as unattainable as a return from exile seemed to the author of the psalm. We could spend the whole day praying for that area of the world, taking in also Syria and Yemen; as well as the rising tide of anti-Semitism, which has still not been expunged from the human psyche.
Israel’s 538 BC release from exile was a sign of God’s love for His people, which is the only, fairly tenuous, link which I can find to the Second Reading and Gospel. The passage from the Letter to the Ephesians celebrates the freely given love of God for the world, through the gift of Jesus Christ the Son of God, a theme developed in the Gospel.
More accurately translated, the extract from Ephesians begins “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love of His with which He loved us…….brought us to life with Christ”. St. John meanwhile declares that “God so loved the world that He gave us His only begotten Son”. He goes on to insist “For God sent His Son into the world not to condemn (or “judge”) the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him”.
“God so loved the world……God sent His Son….not to condemn the world.” Do you believe that—I mean really believe it, in the depth of your being? Attending a death bed, I was reading Jesus’ words to Martha following the death of Lazarus. When I reached Jesus’ question “Do you believe this?” the whole family, gathered around the bed, shouted “Yes!” Could you shout “Yes!” in answer to the question “Do you believe what John says about God’s reason for sending His Son?”
If so, what do you, what do I, have to be afraid of? Yes we have to put our faith in Christ, we have to respond to Him, but the dice are loaded in our favour. Notice something else: it is “the world” (ho kosmos) which Jesus was sent to save. He has saved it, which surely includes “Those who seek God with a sincere heart” as the Fourth Eucharistic prayer puts it, even if their knowledge of Christ is lacking. As St. Paul wrote in a letter which we read a few weeks ago “With God on our side, who can be against us?” And He IS on our side.
