COURAGE

COURAGE – Passion Sunday, Year A

            Life calls us to be courageous at times. Courage is a special gift and grace needed in human life in many different ways. It’s needed as often as we face challenges, dangers from within and from without our person. Life at times puts people in situations demanding great courage. In that first Holy Week, Jesus needed tremendous courage. The descriptions of that week are unbearable. It takes courage for us to stay with them, just as it takes courage to stay with people undergoing great sufferings.

            Jesus fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecies. “I gave my back to those who beat me…my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.” The courage of Jesus came from His life-long faith in His Heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit, and the Father’s will for Him. Having sent Him to save the human race, the Father would sustain Him and support Him by the Holy Spirit in all that He had to undergo.

            Like Jesus, our life at times comes together in climatic moments. In the final holy week of life, our life will reach its conclusion. We move closer to that each day. The quality of the final holy week of our life will be a summary of the previous weeks, months, and years of our life as it was for Jesus.

            We need to live with the realization of the final holy week of our life, and the completion of our earthly life and mission. Such an awareness increases the life, energy, and commitment we put into our day to day life. Jesus had a great sense of timing. He called it “His hour”. Each of us has only so much time on earth to carry out what the Lord has called us to do in our life. We each have a special and particular calling. Our shared calling is to live in Christ and by His Spirit, and by all the implications of such a high calling first received in our baptism and confirmation.

            We also receive, by reason of our living out this call, special calls by the Spirit which enable us to better achieve our original call. My call to be a priest is within my call as a baptized and confirmed Christian. By being a priest, I can best live out my original call in baptism. By being married many are better able to live out their baptismal call. The Lord calls us for ourselves and for others as well. Jesus had a great sense of being called by the Father, and gifted by the Holy Spirit, to carry out the work as the Messiah of Israel and the Savior of the whole human race, by His life, suffering, death on the cross and resurrection from the dead.

            The Spirit calls us to reproduce the pattern of His life in our life. “Christ Jesus, though He was in the form of God did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness…becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

            When the Lord calls someone to do something difficult, which He does to everyone at some time or another, He supports them with His grace and power. As Paul says of Jesus: “Because of this, God greatly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, …and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord”. Jesus is Lord because He is equal to His Father. For the Father is Lord, and Jesus Christ is Lord.

            Our hope is found in living out our calls received from the Lord in spite of the costs and sacrifices demanded. The living of our calls is a form of emptying ourselves. Our calls from God call us to die to ourselves and to any sin. But in the process of dying, we are raised up. The life of Jesus teaches us that. Before we are ready to do what Jesus did in the final week of His life, we have to live the way He did in His life leading up to the final Holy Week. We do that by following God’s will on many lesser levels. The way we live today will have a great impact on that final holy week of our life.

            The passion account shows us the courage of Jesus in the final week of His earthly life. The living of our baptismal life in Christ with the Holy Spirit’s presence throughout our life can give us the needed courage to do God’s will in our life and to have a final holy week like the Lord’s, that is one that completes God’s will for us!

Reflection from Divine Mercy #604

“…what unimaginable glory awaits the person who resembles the suffering Jesus here on earth. That person will resemble Jesus in His glory.”