What's my hour?

Homily

5th Sunday of Lent B2

17 March 2024

St. Lawrence Catholic Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG

What's my hour?

If you look at the timeline of your life, it's not hard to come up with pivotal moments, crucial hours.  

I turn 50 today, praise God and thank you!  I'm so grateful.  I'm laughing today because I always promised myself I'd have life perfectly figured out, perfectly under control, by age 50.  God sure laughed at that plan. I know less than ever. I'm less in control that ever.  But you know what, that's a good thing.  It's more fun, and fruitful to live by faith anyway.

You can't just decide when you're going to have life figured out.  What you can do is learn from your mistakes and missed opportunities. What you can do is trust the things you have done well, with God's help.  What you can do is to keep moving forward, refusing to get stuck in fantasy or regret.  What you can do is face the reality of the hour that you're in, and to engage it with faith.

What's my hour?

Within the paschal mystery of Jesus, within the holy hour of his passion, I have been invited to write my own story.  God's story is the real story.  What's amazing is that I have a part to play, as do you.  This is the story of God's love - Jesus came to embrace the pivotal hour of His life.  He came to show how glorious God's love really is, by passionately emptying Himself, being made perfect through suffering.

That's Jesus' hour that I have been invited to write my story within.  That's Jesus' hour, and if I dare accept it, it's also mine.

Don't ever forget that you have been given the same dignity and vocation as Jesus.  You arrive at life through Him, with Him and in Him, by cooperation and participation is His passion, and like Him we are to be in anguish until this hour is consummated, and accomplished.  Don't ever forget that you have the capacity through the Holy Spirit burning within you to give witness to the glorious love of God, by finding a way to empty yourself.

Most likely you're in the middle of your hour right now, or at least you're trying to be.  To be good at life, to enter fully into life, is to have the courage to face what I need to face, to embrace conflict, and to commit to the process of repentance and conversion that is Jesus' way.

Jesus didn't have any other plan for becoming perfect than facing what he needed to face. He didn't have a plan. He only had a way.

So too I can do without fantasizing about a perfect set of circumstances where I finally get control of my life That's perfectionism.  It lacks faith.  It's worthless, and it's pointless.  Maybe we should all give up perfectionism for Lent.

To be perfect is just to trust that my hour is here, and to engage the passion of my life withing the redemptive passion of Jesus.  That's Holy Week, should I dare to enter in.

If I know the Lord, I'm pretty certain he's more excited to share this moment with you than He was to establish the new covenant in His blood with those men first gathered around His table.

This is his hour.  Is it also yours?

J

+mj