This Sunday's readings are all so wonderful that I really don't know what to say, because I feel that anything I say will be nothing compared to the treasures concealed in each one. The first reading from the prophet Jeremiah is the famous passage where God promises a new covenant written on hearts, not on tablets of stone. That is to say, it is an interior law, which is not imposed, but which one lives spontaneously and joyfully because he desires to live in that covenant with God. The psalm picks up this thread as we repeat the words of King David in Psalm 51: "Create a clean heart in me, O God.” A new heart that is faithful to God's love is also a gift from him. The men who are participating in Mission Ecce Homo are asking for this daily, and it should become for all of us a true obsession – “Lord, give me a good heart, a pure heart, a heart pleasing to you.” As we have also seen in the Mission, that heart is in reality the Heart of Christ, and the Christian life is an authentic "open-heart surgery," a heart transplant that the Holy Spirit desires to perform in us, so that we become truly one with the Heart of Jesus.
In the second reading and in the Gospel, we see this Heart of Jesus, which embraces the redemptive Will of the Father and offers itself for the salvation of the world. The Letter to the Hebrews is impressive: Christ offered prayers and supplications "with loud cries and tears". What an example of obedience Jesus is because it was not easy for him to obey either! The apostle tells us: "He learned obedience from what he suffered". Are we not living the same mystery in the Church today? And yet, this obedience to legitimate superiors, in that which is not sin, is a path of humility and salvation, even if we cannot understand it.
The Holy Gospel today offers us what has been called the "Prayer in the Garden” recorded by John the Apostle. It is in the Synoptic Gospels that the words of Jesus in Gethsemane are recorded: "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet, not as I will, but you will". The fourth Gospel, St. John’s, instead of containing this expression, offers us the scene we have just heard, in which Christ uses different words that express the same interior attitude: "I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”
Jesus’ hour is his Passion and Death. It is, at the same time, the hour of the glorification of the Father. It is also the hour of the glorification of the Son, beautiful in his filial obedience and redemptive love.
The time is approaching when Christ will draw everyone to himself. In seven days, we will celebrate the beginning of Holy Week with Palm Sunday. We will see a Son who obeys by suffering, who loves by obeying, who dies by loving. We will see exposed that pure Heart that God has created in the New Adam, the place of the New Covenant with mankind. Today we are asked to look at Jesus and decide to die with him, in obedience, in fidelity, in the joyful acceptance of the mystery of the Cross in our daily life, in the surrender of ourselves to the Father for the salvation of the world.
Let us ask the Most Holy Trinity to give us hearts that carry the law of God written in them, hearts that joyfully fulfill it because as Scripture says, its precepts are our inheritance forever and the joy of our heart. (Ps 119:111) When it costs us to die like the grain of wheat, when obedience is a great sacrifice for us, let us become strong in the hope that he who hates himself in this world will keep himself for eternal life and that the Father will reward him who, in this life, makes himself, out of love, a servant of Jesus Christ.
May the Lord grant us this Holy Week a participation in the death of Christ. Today, in this Holy Mass, may we unite ourselves to Him who, in the Eucharist, becomes a grain of wheat that by dying gives us eternal life.
