What does my heart break for?

Homily

5th Sunday of Lent A

March 22, 2026

St. Ann Catholic Church Prairie Village, KS

AMDG

Would you rather experience a confession or a resuscitation?  Most of us would say the latter.  I avoid confession but would love to see a loved one come back from the dead.  My mom will have been gone 25 years this March 30th.  It still breaks my heart.

I don't really want to hear 1000 confessions this week.  It's hell week for priests.  Penance services non-stop.  It could easily be 1000 confessions by Easter.  I'm not complaining.  I have the best job in the world.  But there's 5000 of you.  Hearing 1000 confession would only be 20%.

What would Jesus rather see?  A resuscitation or a confession?  You know the answer.  It's written all over today's Gospel.  

It breaks his heart that his friend Lazarus experienced physical death.  It breaks his heart 1000x more when I don't use confession.  

Physical death is not supposed to be that scary or threatening to faith.  But it is, for all of us.  Take it from two saints, Mary and Martha, who give voice to my experience of death.  Lord, you could have done something.  Why do you stay distant is the face of physical death.  If you had been here, my mother would not have died.   Jesus is the worst first responder in history.  When he finds out that his best friend is dead, he freezes.  He remained where he was for two days.

But physical death is not threatening to God.  He can make something from nothing.  He can create from dust.  It's nothing for him to resuscitate or resurrect.  He was ridiculed for saying the daughter of Jairus and the son of the widow in Nain were merely sleeping.  He gets perturbed when people are so fearful of death.  He is the resurrection and the life.  For him physical death is nothing.  He asks the Marys if they trust this.  If they believe it.

So why does Jesus weep?  Why does he let his heart break?  It's to show how devastated He would be if my life ended in spiritual death.  It's to show what it will cost Him to forgive my sins.  It's because of my stubbornness of heart and slowness to believe that His heart is broken.

Which is to say he weeps when I don't go to confession.  Which is the converse of His rejoicing more over one sinner who repents than over 99 people who skip confession.  He cries that I try to hold on stubbornly to my bios when He wants only to restore my zoe, the Spirit of God dwelling in me.  

As a sign of how much He wants to forgive my sins, He call Lazarus out of the tomb.  This sixth and penultimate sign in John's Gospel is about the forgiveness of my sins.  Lazarus goes into the confessional stinky dead; he emerges from the tomb alive again in the Holy Spirit.

My heart breaks for what breaks Jesus heart.  When you settle for bios when you are meant for zoe.  

Which means I'll see you in confession this week.  It's not really hell week, but confess to beat hell week.  

What does your heart break for?  Is it for your friends who have lost their bios or their zoe?  Would you rather see a resuscitation or a confession?

+mj  

Why do you exist?

Homily

4th Sunday of Lent A2

15 March 2026

St. Ann Catholic Church - Prairie Village

AMDG

Do you need to have your eyes checked?  The Jayhawks certainly do after shooting an ungodly 24% last night in the Big 12 tournament.  

I certainly do as well. I've had bad nearsightedness my whole life.  I live in fear of a detached retina from my eyes being so drastically corrected so many times. In the area of visual intelligence, I am special needs.  My mind doesn't take pictures and it's hard for me to remember faces.  I would be the worst witness to a crime. I'm the worst at spatial relations and seeing how things like puzzles fit together.  It's torture for me.  

I need to have my eyes checked.  How about you?

How about the meaning of my life?  Do I see it clearly? Let's see. 

Why did God make me?

The Baltimore Catechism took a good crack at it.  God made me to know, love and serve Him in this life and to be together with Him in the next.  

Today's Gospel has a better answer I dare say.  Why do you exist?  You exist for the glory of God. You exist to be transfigured by His light.  You exist to make God visible!

It's why the man in today's long Gospel was born blind.  It's the reason you were born blind, without the light of faith in you. It's so that the glorious works of God might become visible in you!

The glory of God is you being fully alive.  The shame of God is you remaining dead in your sins.  Whoever has the light of Christ given in baptism, deepened by Confirmation, fed by the Eucharist and restored by confession is a new creation.  Which means you are a unique and unrepeatable star in the constellation of heaven, a reflection of the invisible glory of God that can only be visible in you.  

You are an image of God, destined to grow in His likeness.  That's why you exist.  To make God visible.

Whoever sees this in faith sees the most dramatic and glorious thing that has ever transpired in human history, you being reborn in baptism and coming back from the dead to new life.  Whoever does not see this is blind.

Why do I encourage everyone to have their babies baptized at Mass?  It's so we have a chance to know each other, in a spousal way, as those who become the intimate adopted family of God by baptism.    

But there's another reason.  It's because you keep forgetting the dignity of your baptism, and why you exist, and the most dramatic thing that has ever happened to you and is being made more visible at this very liturgy.  

If you don't see the glory of your baptism being illumined by the light of the Gospel and fed with the food of the Eucharist, you are blind.  You need to get your eyes checked.  My sight on its own is very limited in its perspective.  Yet I walk by faith and not merely by human sight.  If I walk in the bright light of the Holy Spirit dwelling within me, I see the big picture, and my place in the most brilliant story ever written.

We baptize children so that we can see clearly that unless the light of the Holy Spirit dwells within us, we are simply existing not living.  We put ashes on our forehead to make visible that unless we walk by faith not by sight, we are dead men walking.

Why do you exist?  To reflect the glory of God!