Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
RCL – Lent 4 B – Sunday 22 March 2009
Numbers 21:4-9
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21
“Crux Mundi Medicina Est.” Maybe you have noticed that Latin inscription over the lintel of the monastery’s front porch. Not unlike our crucified Lord, that hunk of green marble had to be lifted up, hoisted up there, for all to see. “The Cross is the medicine of the world” it announces. How can that be?
Well, there is a bit of metaphor and symbolism at work here. You could say “The medicine of the world is God’s grace of faith and love.” Let’s look into that, shall we?
In the last 2 weeks, this community has witnessed beautiful signs of deepening faith and widening love. Two weeks ago, our ex-postulant Charles became Br. Charles as he was clothed in the monastic habit and became our latest novice.
Last monday, Mark arrived for his two-week aspirant visit with our community.
And then, this past Thursday, Br. James made his initial profession of the Benedictine vow to God in front of a great many people. Signs of faith and love abound all the time, of course, but I sometimes need a few big ones to refresh my ability to notice them.
All three of these men are responding to God’s gift of faith and love. And all three, as I know them, cannot help but witness to God’s love in good works small and great. Thanks be to God for each one of them.
*****
In accepting to go to the cross, God, in the person of Jesus, demonstrated that it is in love that we are called in a new covenant with the divine.
Despite what many prophets of doom would like us to believe, we are not called to God’s judgment in order to decide if we are worthy of the new covenant. If God’s new covenant had been all about judgment, Jesus wouldn’t have taken on human flesh to end up on a cross, die and be raised from the dead.
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God loves us first and foremost, regardless of our merits. God reaches out to give us abundant and eternal life through faith in Jesus. And God does that as a gift, as a free gift, as grace. Now, a gift more completely becomes a gift when it is accepted, opened and enjoyed. We can embrace God’s grace or we can leave it. Come to think of it, this is much like a medicine. It is most effective in curing your ailment if you take it, and if you take it as prescribed.
In being lifted up on the cross, Jesus showed us how his love of God and his love of God’s people surpassed any law and resulting judgment. If judgment there is, we are our own prosecutor. Divine love is freely offered through faith in Jesus. When God turns to me and offers his love, if my hands are too occupied - obstinately grabbing much less valuable things – then I cannot receive the grace of faith and requite the love God offers.
If I choose to not accept the gift, I have condemned myself; and the condemnation is that I am not availing myself of a love that is always there, ready to answer. God looks at us in love first. We get to choose to look away, or to embrace that love. We get to move into the light, to be revealed and converted. Or we get to stay in darkness, hoping that our shortcomings are going unnoticed, and will continue to accrue us the vanities we so cherish.
But darkness is not dark to God’s gaze. God continues to look at us in love, no matter what. As soon as I’m turning my gaze towards him; as soon as I let go of the trivial things I thought so valuable to hang on to; as soon as I choose of my own will to do move into the light, God’s gift of faith and my receiving of his love are possible. I no longer stand self-condemned but loved into abundant and eternal life.
*****
The cross is a powerful symbol of God’s love for the world; a love that does not come as a result of a judgment, but rather as total self-giving, before any judgment occurs, and as an instrument of our self-conviction. We can embrace the cross and be convicted of love or we can shirk the cross and convict ourselves to remaining in darkness.
*****
So what do you think? Do we need to first prove in our actions that we are building God’s commonwealth of love, his republic of universal welfare? Is that what gets God’s attention? Is that how we woo him to love us?
Or do we fall in love with the source of all love, and then, become irrepressibly driven to bring God’s love to the world in any way we are gifted to?
*****
The followers of Paul summed it up best in their pastoral letter to the people of God at Ephesus.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”
So faith is received. God’s love is then requited. Faith opens us up to the love for God, not our efforts at pleasing God. But through faith and love, our way of life becomes to do God’s works as he desires us to do.
We pray “Your will be done, on earth as in heaven” or “may my will become subsumed in yours.” No faith vs. works argument here; faith first, love a close second and good works as an outcome of both.
*****
So God’s grace of faith and love is the medicine of the world. And the cross can be a symbol of that love; universal, unconditional, unmediated; a love that perfects us in loving in the same way; universally, unconditionally. In a phrase, love divine.
Eventually, Holy Cross aspirants, postulants, novices and initially professed may be called, like their elders, to don the life profession cross of our Order on their monastic habit. But already, they choose to don that cross in their hearts.
May God send us many more courageous and loving men like them.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
Thanks be to God.
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