Perhaps you saw the commercial during the Super Bowl titled “He Gets Us,” depicting a variety of individuals washing the feet of others.
This campaign began a few years ago, and I believe it to be an earnest attempt at pre-evangelization, marketing Jesus to those in our modern culture who are on the peripheries of Christianity. “He Gets Us” mirrors a synodal Church that accompanies individuals in their unique circumstances without expecting moral perfection.
The message of Jesus relating to our real-life situations is a necessary and first step in proclaiming the good news — through the Incarnation, he meets us in our brokenness and misery. This is where the message begins, but if it stops here, it remains something that I would label “the partial Gospel.” The full Gospel that the Church proclaims throughout Lent to catechumens and rank and file Christians alike is something more akin to rescue and liberation. Jesus doesn’t simply get us, he saves us!
Over the past four weeks of Lent, we have heard episodes from the Old Testament that tell the story of salvation.
In the stories of Noah’s ark and the flood, Abraham and Isaac at the altar of sacrifice, Moses and the 10 Commandments, and the rescue from Babylonian captivity, the love of God is on full display through extraordinary and tender actions. The reality of sin has dire consequences, and God saves his people time and again through covenantal relationship.
Sin is a big deal, even one sin, and it demands a savior. Outweighing vices with virtues or bad deeds with good deeds is not sufficient to save anyone. Only God can save us from sin and death. In the old covenant, he used patriarchs like Noah and Moses as mediators, but sin and disorder remained. The new covenant established by God’s son was necessary to break the ancient curse, once and for all.
Through the paschal mystery of Jesus, the Gospel finds its completion. We are attractive to God precisely in our sinfulness. Like a physician to pain, Jesus is attracted to our sin. His death and resurrection applied to our wounded nature is the only remedy that can save us. The famous lines from chapter 3 of John’s Gospel display the heart of the Gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son … (not) to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (Jn 3:16-17).
Jesus kept company with sinners, and they were the ones changed and converted. Those who prefer darkness to light are unable to receive the salvation he offers — they choose enslavement to wickedness over the life and freedom that he offers.
If we want to rejoice on this Laetare Sunday, we have to relate to our sins the same way that Jesus relates to them, nailing them to the cross. Jesus did not come to tolerate the ugliness of sin, nor did he come to make bad people good, but to raise dead people to life. I rejoice in the message of St. Paul, that “even when we were dead in our transgressions, (God) brought us to life in Christ” (Eph 2:5).
Father VanHoose is pastor of St. Jude of the Lake in Mahtomedi.
Sunday, March 10
Fourth Sunday of Lent
