Head way to glory

Instead of the usual Sunday homily, today during Mass we hear the reading of the Passion of Our Lord as narrated by St Luke the Evangelist. One question which immediately strikes us here is this: How is it that St Luke, who is nowhere mentioned in all three Synoptics as a disciple of Christ, could have possibly given us so many details about Our Lord's sacred Passion? No satisfactory reply has so far been given to this query, except the probability that he, still quite young, might have heard all the details from Our Lord's disciples.

The whole season of Lent, but especially the last week before Easter, is the climax of the Church's vibrant call, inviting all Christians to full and sincere conversion, to a definite commitment to the person of Jesus Christ and all his teachings. He is the eternal Son of God, sent to us by the Father to show us the true and only way to salvation.

Just as all this has cost Jesus untold suffering and the giving up of his mortal life, so also the following of Christ during our lifetime is bound to mean much sacrifice on our part; not however without the guarantee of a share in his victory in Heaven. The common saying "No prize without price" is certainly applicable here.

While gradually manifesting Himself to His chosen people, God continued to the very end to accept sacrifices which, in a sense, were hardly different from those offered by pagans to their gods. In all these sacrifices no human beings were being offered, but only animals or the products of the earth, with the exception of Abraham's readiness to sacrifice his own son Isaac.

Meanwhile, the prophets had been raising their voices on repeated occasions, trying to convince the people that all kinds of religious rites in themselves did not in the least affect their personal lives. The people were therefore being reminded constantly by their prophets that what, after all, interested God was not the offering of what one has, but of what one is. God wanted a living sacrifice: the sacrifice of praise and inner conversion, dying to self to allow God to take over and give meaning to any form of praise and sacrifice.

The denial of the necessity of a sacrifice of this type was evident in the position which the priests of the Temple had been taking in regard to Christ. Jesus's behaviour, and still more his preaching, were contradicting their understanding of sacrifice. It is this which, among other things, was making them feel so frustrated. The safest way out of it all was therefore to eliminate Jesus at all costs.

Jesus accepted their challenge and made use of his very living person to offer to God the one and only meaningful sacrifice which had the power to atone for all the sins of mankind past, present and future, and to throw wide open the gates of Heaven for us all. It was all, in fact, a matter of love: love for his eternal Father, but also love for all of us, God's children.

During this Holy Week, in preparation for Easter, we all want to accompany Jesus along his sacred Passion. We will do this as poor sinners, but also as God's children, begging him, the Immaculate "Lamb of God", to take away our own sins and all the sins of the world. This is equivalent to dying spiritually with Christ, but also like him being raised to a more human and truly Christian existence.