HOMILY: THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT ‘B’ 2018

In St John’s Gospel, time and again, the words of Jesus convey to us an immense richness of meaning.  This is very much the case with the words Jesus spoke to the Jews after he had cleansed the Temple: ‘Destroy this Sanctuary and in three days I will raise it up’.  Was he speaking of the time, in fact not far ahead, when the Jerusalem Temple would be no more?  No, the Evangelist tells us, ‘he was speaking of the sanctuary that was his Body’.  He was speaking of the imminent destruction of his Body on the Cross – and of his Resurrection on the Third Day.

As we advance through Lent, today’s Gospel is given us to prepare us for our celebration of the Lord’s Saving Passion in Holy Week: his Saving Passion that is the source of our healing and forgiveness.  Through the destruction of the Sanctuary of his Body on the Cross and through his resurrection from the dead on the Third Day, Jesus has opened up for us the way to have our sins forgiven.  He has opened up for us the way, the ‘living way’, that leads from the death of sin to the life of righteousness.   Jesus, our Saviour, allowed the Temple, the Sanctuary of his Body, to be destroyed.  He was, as St Paul puts it, ‘made to be sin’ for us;  he bore our sins in his own Body on the Cross, so that we might be freed from sin and be made one with him, raised up to share his life – the life of his Risen Body:  in the Church now, in glory later.

At our Baptism, we received the Lord’s forgiveness.  The Original Sin inherited from our first parents was forgiven, but, as we know only too well, we still remain weak and liable to sin.  We need time and again throughout our life to call on the Lord’s mercy – or else we risk slowly but surely drifting away from him and becoming closed to his love.  And the surest way to call on his mercy is the sacramental way – through the Sacrament of Confession, the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the Sacrament of Penance – to use some of the various terms we have for this God-given means of grace.

In the Sacrament, we expose ourselves to God, as Jesus exposed himself on the Cross.  We allow ourselves to be stripped bare.  We expose to God what needs to be destroyed in us.  We allow God to have free course in us and. like this, we open ourselves to receive in Absolution the miracle of the Resurrection:  in Absolution, we are raised up again, we are restored to communion once again with the Lord in his Resurrection.

Even if you have not been to Confession for a long time, I would urge you to go in the next few weeks before Easter.  There are times here every Saturday – Confessions are heard every day at the Shrine at Walsingham from 11am until the Mid-day Mass – and there is the Service of Reconciliation at North Walsham on the Saturday morning before Palm Sunday.   The Ten Commandments we heard in today’s First Reading offer a well-tried way to examine our conscience.