As swiftly as when we first entered into Lent on Ash Wednesday, we are now fast entering into Holy Week beginning with Palm Sunday.
And so through this Lenten journey of 2022 we need to reflect deeply to see if we are more united with Christ Jesus our Lord and with one another, then we have ever been!? Will we be a people welcoming Him, “Hosanna! Hosanna! Blessed is He comes in the name of the Lord.” Joyful that the Lord is present in our midst as we basked together as One in His love for Him and for one another.
Or will we be a people who shouts ,”Crucify him! Crucify Him! for we have refused to repent of our sins. Looking inwardly at ourselves, our wants, our desires. Community? What community?! Every man, woman, child for themselves! My journey, my choice!
Then just like Caiaphas himself, we will find that we have not grasped the situation at all! We have failed to see that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has sought through this Lent to gather all of us unto Himself. To renew, heal and transform us so that we can experience the depts of being One through Him, with Him and in Him. He wants to dwell in our hearts, for He is our God and we are His people.
Sanctify me Lord! That I may become Your Holy dwelling place. Amen
First reading
Ezekiel 37:21-28 ·
I will bring them home and make them one nation
The Lord says this: ‘I am going to take the sons of Israel from the nations where they have gone. I shall gather them together from everywhere and bring them home to their own soil. I shall make them into one nation in my own land and on the mountains of Israel, and one king is to be king of them all; they will no longer form two nations, nor be two separate kingdoms. They will no longer defile themselves with their idols and their filthy practices and all their sins. I shall rescue them from all the betrayals they have been guilty of; I shall cleanse them; they shall be my people and I will be their God. My servant David will reign over them, one shepherd for all; they will follow my observances, respect my laws and practise them. They will live in the land that I gave my servant Jacob, the land in which your ancestors lived. They will live in it, they, their children, their children’s children, for ever. David my servant is to be their prince for ever. I shall make a covenant of peace with them, an eternal covenant with them. I shall resettle them and increase them; I shall settle my sanctuary among them for ever. I shall make my home above them; I will be their God, they shall be my people. And the nations will learn that I am the Lord, the sanctifier of Israel, when my sanctuary is with them for ever.’
Gospel
John 11:45-56
Jesus was to die to gather together the scattered children of God
Many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary and had seen what Jesus did believed in him, but some of them went to tell the Pharisees what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and Pharisees called a meeting. ‘Here is this man working all these signs’ they said ‘and what action are we taking? If we let him go on in this way everybody will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy the Holy Place and our nation.’ One of them, Caiaphas, the high priest that year, said, ‘You do not seem to have grasped the situation at all; you fail to see that it is better for one man to die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed.’ He did not speak in his own person, it was as high priest that he made this prophecy that Jesus was to die for the nation – and not for the nation only, but to gather together in unity the scattered children of God. From that day they were determined to kill him. So Jesus no longer went about openly among the Jews, but left the district for a town called Ephraim, in the country bordering on the desert, and stayed there with his disciples.
The Jewish Passover drew near, and many of the country people who had gone up to Jerusalem to purify themselves looked out for Jesus, saying to one another as they stood about in the Temple, ‘What do you think? Will he come to the festival or not?’
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