Now is the time. My hour is here. These are words that bring both excitement and dread, for Jesus, as we hear, and for us. We understand this physiologically as an adrenaline rush. The time fight or to flee. The moment we have been preparing for and waiting for, but aren't quite yet ready for.
Sometimes life changes in an instant, unexpectedly. As I was driving guys to Conception Seminary College yesterday during the worst of the snowstorm, I saw people going off the road and spinning and crashing. Talk about an adrenaline rush. For me who was watching this, adrenaline turned into a quick Hail Mary for their safety. For them, some other choice words may have come out before they screamed or yelled 'O my God!' I had coffee this morning with a young man who has been told he needs brain surgery to correct a tumor. Life is changing for him rapidly. Too fast, actually. Sometimes life changes in an instant, unexpectedly.
Other times, life meanders on. We get depressed with our normal routine. We long for something extreme, even as we are afraid of such things. At the very least, we long for meaning in our lives, and for the chance to give our lives to something beyond us. We want to live lives that matter, and we want to matter to someone. We want to live lives that bear fruit that will last longer than we will. We want to find something worth dying for, and if we don't, we depress ourselves by settling for small pleasure after small pleasure that never finally satisfy.
Jesus names this desire of the human person to give perfectly of Himself. To love perfectly. Without an opportunity to love perfectly, to die to self, to find something worth dying for, the human person collapses in on himself. He remains adolescent, complaining when things do not go his way or when his comfort is compromised. We see this unhappiness in ourselves and in others. We experience many great things in life. We pursue many things. Yet none of it adds up to perfect satisfaction. Our greatest desire is exactly what Jesus says it is. We want to die to ourselves. That is the only way to be free. We can spend a lifetime trying to satisfy as many of the millions of desires that we have as we can. Yet there still remains that deepest desire. We want to make a perfect gift of ourselves to something. We want to love perfectly. Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat. Yet if it dies, it bears much fruit.
When the Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover asked to see Jesus, it was the sign He was waiting for. I do not know why this was the sign that Jesus needed, I only know that it was. He says, 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.' We can be sure that Jesus had been preparing for this hour for many years, and He was still troubled. We can never know how we will react when our hour comes. We can be sure that we will be troubled, for God who loves us and calls us to love, will ask us to make a perfect gift of ourselves, and this will not be easy. It will take perfect trust in God, and this is the hardest thing any of us has to do. It is hard to trust God, because He asks in faith to give more than we can ever be ready to give.
There are billboards running on buses in Canada that say, 'There probably isn't a God. So quit worrying and get on with your life.' Clever billboards. They remind us not to believe in a God of mythology or to be adolescent in our faith. They remind us not to serve God simply because we are His slaves, who fear punishment from our master. But as far as getting on with our lives, what can these billboards mean? Certainly the billboards are promising a life free of worry. But they are not promising anything close to what Jesus is promising. Jesus promises that whoever finds something worth dying for, and whoever gives his life perfectly, will bear abundant fruit. This is obviously a much greater promise that don't worry, be happy!
Next Sunday we will enter into Holy Week. We will gather to announce that the most important hour in the history of the world, the hour of Jesus passion, death and resurrection, is an hour that can come forward and encompass the present hour. We can insert our lives within the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ, and in so doing, our lives can once again be filled with that adrenaline rush of believing that now is the time when we are called to die to ourselves, and to love perfectly, as Christ has first loved us!
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