4th Sunday of Lent

The readings for this weekend emphasize God's deep love and mercy for His people, but also highlight the consequences of rejecting His offer of salvation. The first reading from 2 Chronicles explains how the people of Judah were unfaithful to God, leading to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. The author emphasizes that sin has serious consequences, both physically and spiritually. However, the passage also offers hope in God's mercy, as He allows the people to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. This serves as a reminder for us to repent, seek conversion, and continually turn our hearts towards the Lord. While God's anger and wrath are human words used to communicate a divine reality, it's important to understand that God's love and mercy are always present. Our relationship with God may change, but He remains constant. We can always seek His mercy and salvation, asking for the grace of conversion of heart. Despite the seriousness of sin, there is always hope and rest Well, three of our readings for this weekend speak about the deep love and care that God has for His people, and how much mercy He wants, He has for us, and He wants us to receive. And they also speak about the seriousness of what it means to reject that offer of love and mercy, that God does not force Himself upon us, He makes an offer of love and salvation to us, and it's freely offered, but we have to freely respond to it, but to reject that offer of salvation, that offer of relationship with Him, is not a neutral choice, it has consequences, and the consequences are bad, are awful, to reject God, to reject what He offers us to be in relationship with Him. So again, all of our readings speak about this, but I want to focus especially on our first reading from the second book of Chronicles, so just a little bit of background. The first and second book of Chronicles essentially mirror first and second kings, so telling the history of the people of Israel around the kingship, the author of Chronicles focuses primarily on the southern part of the kingdom, essentially exclusively, so Judah, and he has more of a theological outlook, as he tells the history, but it's also with a theological bend, a theological explanation for why things happened as they did, and so this passage we have is right near the end of the final chapter of the second book of Chronicles, and so at this point, the author's gone through and explained how through Israel's history, they've been unfaithful to the Lord, and the Lord's tried to warn His people over and over again to return, to repent, and the people have ignored those warnings, and so Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, the temple was destroyed, many people were put to the sword or killed, and then the remaining survivors, most of them were deported to a foreign land. So in the Jewish mindset, this was a devastating event to have happened, it was almost unthinkable just in their psychological view of how they were viewing God and themselves, that Jerusalem was supposed to be the holy city, the protected city, it was the place where God had His dwelling, the temple, the one place on earth where God had chosen to dwell, and so the mindset of the Jewish people was, how could God have allowed this to happen? How could He have allowed this much evil, this much devastation? We thought He was going to protect us, and so the author of Chronicles is giving an answer to that, he's saying, well, here's your answer, and part of the answer then is, it says right at the beginning of this passage, that the princes of Judah, the priests and the people, so every level of society, right, so those in religious authority, those in secular authority, and the people themselves, added infidelity to infidelity, practicing all the abominations of the nations and polluting the Lord's temple, which He had consecrated in Jerusalem. So God had made a promise to be with His people in Jerusalem, to make Jerusalem and the temple His dwelling place, but He had warned right from the outset that He would only remain there if the people were faithful to Him, right, if they were to worship Him, if they would remove idolatry and evil doing, and the people didn't, right, they gave themselves over to the pagan practices of the surrounding nations, they set up false idols, they practiced adultery, theft, murder, right, all sorts of evil and wickedness, and that has consequences, and the author goes on to say that early and often did the God of their father send His messengers to them, right, so God gave them chances over and over, He had compassion on His people and His dwelling place, and He says, but they mocked the messengers of God, despised His warning, and scoffed at His prophets, until the anger of the Lord against His people was so inflamed that there was no remedy. So God then allows the people to experience the bad consequences of their behavior, right, the consequences of sin, and so what God is making clear is that our sinful behavior has serious, serious consequences, and it's certainly good for the people of Judah that it's showing their physical consequences, there's physical death and physical destruction, for us, right, as Christians, we can look at that, and the stakes are actually a lot higher, right, because to ignore or to treat like it's not a big deal, the salvation that God offers us, to us in Jesus Christ, if we reject that, then far from, much worse than merely physical death, we can experience spiritual death, right, separation from God for all of eternity, and so this reading, all these readings this weekend is a call to repentance, to conversion, to ask the Lord that what I believe with my mind, I believe with my heart, and that my heart is continually converted more and more towards the Lord. Just a quick word here on this image, this language that the author uses about the anger of the Lord being inflamed against his people, right, so a lot of times in the Old Testament you have kind of the image of the anger or wrath of God being used, and it's important for us to understand that those are words, human words, for human language, that the authors are trying to communicate a divine reality. So God is a pure spirit, so God doesn't have a body, so he doesn't have emotions, he doesn't get angry or upset, like we do, he doesn't lose patience, but what does change, so God never changes, God is eternally love, mercy, justice, all of that, everything good, God is constantly that, he never changes. What does change is our relationship to him. One image I heard that was kind of helpful for visualizing this is, you think of a pendulum, right, so a pendulum, you've got the hinge, you've got the arm, you've got the ball at the bottom, and the pendulum swings back and forth, well, the hinge never changes, right, the hinge stays in one fixed point, but then as the arm is affixed to the ball, and it swings back and forth, the position of the ball and the arm changes, and so that image can be helpful for us in thinking, well, God is the fixed point, right, he's the hinge, he doesn't change, his love, his mercy, his grace is always there, so if we at times feel abandoned by God, or if we feel that God is somehow angry or upset with us, or we feel distanced from God, it's a good cause for us to start reflecting on our lives and saying, okay, well, I know God doesn't change, so have I changed, right, have I given myself over to unrepentant sin, right, have I been ignoring God by not spending time with him in prayer, have I not been asking God to help me and assist me in my daily life, right, have I just kind of swung back and forth, and so as I swing, so to speak, closer to God, I'll feel his presence, his peace, his joy, and then as I'm getting farther away from him, it might feel as though God is distanced, or angry, or upset, to use this language, but again, it's important for us to understand the reality, the reality is God doesn't change, and his love and mercy is always there for us, so it's for us, then, to reflect on how am I doing in relationship to him, because although God doesn't change, I do, we do, and our relationship with him will change, and that will affect how we perceive God, so the good thing, then, is we can always take God up on his offer of mercy and salvation, and to repent, to ask the Lord for that grace of conversion of heart, that's also a good way to kind of check ourselves, too, right, look, when was the last time I asked the Lord specifically for that grace of conversion of heart, maybe there's a particular thing I'm struggling with in my life, or a relationship, maybe I'm struggling with a particular church teaching on something, have I asked God to help me, have I asked God the Lord to help me, for my heart to be converted in this area, right, I need more of you, I need more of your grace, more of the power of your Holy Spirit, I don't want to remain as I am, and obviously if I've committed some sort of serious sin, I want to run right back to the confession, to accept God's mercy and salvation, and then just at the end here, although we have, again, the kind of the bad news of what happens when we abandon God, and we turn away from him, and we experience that distance from him, that destruction, so to speak, and God's mercy is always greater than our sins and our failings, so right at the end of this passage, we have a message of restoration of hope, that even in the exile that the people experience, Cyrus, the king of Persia, is raised up by God, and he is inspired by the Lord to allow the Jewish people to return to their home, to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple, so even in the midst of experiencing God's justice and the bad consequences of sin that the people needed to experience in order to realize how serious it is to offend God, God's mercy and grace is still there, and his mercy isn't overcome or overwhelmed by our sins, and so this passage, again, helping us to understand the seriousness of remaining in a relationship with God also helps us to understand that there's always hope, there's always mercy and salvation that's offered to us, and so my brothers and sisters, as we approach Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, we get to receive the great grace of salvation in the Eucharist, Jesus' body, blood, soul, and divinity, let's ask him for that grace that we might always say, yes, the salvation he will vow to us, let's ask him for the grace for conversion of heart, that our lives might be totally and completely centered on him.