Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. Make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Today we celebrate the fourth Sunday of Lent.

The opening Prayer O God, who through your word reconcile the human race to yourself in a wonderful way. Grant, we pray, that with prompt devotion and eager faith, the Christian people may hasten toward the solemn celebrations to come through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A reading from 2 Chronicles 36, 1416, and 1923 in those days all the princes of Judah, the priests and the people, added infidelity to infidelity, practicing all the abominations of the nations, and polluting the Lord’s temple, which he had consecrated in Jerusalem. Early and often did the Lord, the God of their fathers, send his messengers to them, for he had compassion on his people in his dwelling place. But they mocked the messengers of God, despised his warnings, scoffed at his prophets, until the anger of the Lord against his people was so inflamed there was no remedy.

Their enemies burnt the house of God, tore down the walls of Jerusalem, set all its palaces afire, and destroyed all its precious objects. Those who escaped the sword were carried captive to Babylon, where they became servants of the king of the Chaldeans and his sons, until the kingdom of the Persians came to power. All this was to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah until the land has retrieved its lost sabbaths, during all the time it lies waste it shall have rest while 70 years are fulfilled. In the first year of Cyrus the King of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord inspired King Cyrus of Persia to issue this proclamation throughout his kingdom, both by word and mouth and in writing. Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia, all the kingdoms of the earth the Lord, the God of heaven, has given to me he has also charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever therefore, among you belongs to any part of his people, let him go up, and may his God be with him the Word of the Lord.

Responsorial Psalm Let my tongue be silenced if ever I forget you. A reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, second chapter four through the 10th verse. God, who is rich in mercy because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ. By grace you have been saved, raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in his kingdom to us and in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you.

It is the gift of God. It is not from works, so no one may boast. For we are as handiwork created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance that we should live in them. The Word of the Lord first before the Gospel God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so everyone who believes in him might have eternal life. The gospel for this fourth Sunday of Lent is taken from St. John, third chapter 1421 Jesus said to Nicodemus, just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the verdict that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light so that his works might not be exposed. But whoever lives in the truth comes to the light so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.

The Gospel of the Lord Sa the Scriptures are a treasure of information, of wisdom, knowledge. And many say that the Scriptures are both anthropological and theological meaning. They reveal to us the nature and the evolution of human beings and the nature of God as He slowly reveals Himself to His people. So through Scripture we learn about who we are, we learn about who God is, and we learn about why we are here in this world. So let’s look for a moment at this notion that we have of this God who reveals himself slowly to us. And it’s so interesting.

In this reading from Chronicles, we see the evolution of God from a God who, when he saw his people not being who they were supposed to be, who he longed for them to be, he made them in his image, and they were not initially in that image. In the time of Noah, he saw what he created, even though when he created it, he said it was so very, very good. He looked at it all and said, I made a mistake. I’m so sorry. I don’t like these people. They’re hard hearts are filled with darkness, and I’m going to destroy everything.

I created a very strange story, in a sense, but it underscores the fact that we have a destiny that is so much higher than what he saw in his people. In a way that we see in God a kind of connection to our humanness. It made sense. He created something he hoped for that would be so much more than it was. And he was so disappointed that he said, I want to scrap it all. So he reveals himself as someone like us.

But in this story, it’s different. In this story, we see an evolution of God because we see the same situation. These people are filled with all kinds of iniquity and all kinds of sinfulness, and they’re just turning from God completely. And so instead of wanting to destroy them, his first reaction now is compassion. I have compassion for them. And so early and often, I love that set of words.

Early and often he kept saying, listen, you’re in the wrong direction. You’re going towards something that will destroy you. Please listen to my word that I give you through my prophets, and change, change, turn away from what you’re doing. And they didn’t. And then you’ll notice instead of God punishing them, he allows the enemies to punish his people. It’s the way of saying, all right, you’re going to choose a way of life that is destructive.

Well, I’m going to allow you to have that way of life, and it will destroy you. And what happens? You lose everything that you have, and you become a slave. It’s a perfect image of the kind of, how would I say, addicted qualities of human nature that can turn away from light and truth and continue to go to darkness over and over again. And they are slaves of it. They’re not free to do anything else.

It’s a beautiful description of human nature. And so we see in that particular passage then, something that God is doing. Because at the end of a very difficult period, 70 years, that these People had to live with the results of their choices. They were ready to change. And then God infuses in a man, Cyrus, who is able to create the. The world that God wants them to live in again for them.

He allows Cyrus to build this wonderful temple and they go back and hopefully all those experiences change them. So you get a different image that God is not wanting to destroy that which is not what it should be. He wants it to grow and to change. But the only way he can do that in the Old Testament was to put him through a period of great suffering. Great suffering. So there is always that image of God working with people, taking people on a journey, bringing them into something new.

And they have to go through something that’s difficult and painful. So there’s something about, in a way, in that system, we earn God’s favor because we learn from our mistakes. We changed, and now we’re pleasing to him. But something is coming. Something is coming. And the thing that is coming is so different than that that we don’t always understand how much we have received from God’s mysterious gift of revealing himself in the person of Jesus to be the one who is really the fullness of who God is.

And he is mercy. He is absolute love and forgiveness for the sinner in his or her sinfulness. I don’t know why that’s so hard for us to understand the shift that Jesus reveals in the world of who God the Father truly is. He is not anyone who is interested in turning away from anyone who is failing. He wants to turn toward them, transform them, awaken them. And it’s done through this mysterious thing that is talked about in Paul’s letter.

He said, there is this thing called grace. Grace. What is grace? It is an unbelievable understanding of who God is in his love for sinners. It is love incarnate. And when we think about the things that we have failed at, we think about the things that we’ve not done.

We feel the shame, we feel unworthy of being loved. We get caught in that. And that’s the antithesis of grace. Grace. Because grace is never earned. Grace is graciously given.

It’s not out of an obligation that God loves us. It is a free gift. It is his favor. And it’s so hard for us to understand that God has such favor for us in our most unattractive states, when we are absolutely destroying one another, hurting one another, harming ourselves and others. And yet his response is not to destroy us, not to give us over to our enemies, but in the fullness of revelation to do something radically different, to tell us over and over and over again that we are loved and that it is his grace that enables us to realize that even in our greatest imperfection, we have this God who loves us because he sees and understands and and is aware of the seed of goodness within us. And he knows us, he created us.

And he knows the thing that will work best is when that seed is loved for what it is. We put so much emphasis on our actions as that’s who we are. But there’s a core of all of us that knows who we really are. It’s like I think of education as trying to awaken us to the things we already know. So it seems clear that human beings had to go through a process of evolution before they could fully understand the mystery of grace, redemption, forgiveness for sinners as we’re sinning. Not when we change, not when we’re sorry, not when we ask for pardon.

The love is given consistently. If we accept that love, that’s a way of realizing what we’ve done. And we go through a thing called repentance. And repentance means we regret what we did. And it doesn’t mean that we have to have the repentance before we have God’s love. And that’s what I think is a mistake.

I think I’ve been always told, unless you choose freely to not ever sin again, promise you’ll never sin again, you can’t be forgiven. Well, that doesn’t make sense. In human nature, we don’t sin because we want to necessarily. We sin because we are drawn to it in a way that is somehow overpowering our own free choice. This image of grace is at the heart of this set of readings. So I want to see if I can awaken you to this gift a little more by showing you what Jesus did when he was talking to Nicodemus.

You know the story of Nicodemus and Jesus? Nicodemus was one of the Pharisees, maybe scribe, I forget, but he was a high official in the temple, and he, unlike many others, but maybe there was more than we know, were really intrigued by the message of Jesus. They had something in their hearts that made them realize what he’s saying would be incredibly awesome if it were true that we are truly forgiven, not because we’ve changed, but because forgiveness is the stuff that we need to change. It’s being loved in our sinfulness that awakens us to our goodness. And so Nicodemus comes and wants to know about this thing that Jesus is teaching and he uses a phrase, he said, just as the serpent was lifted up by Moses in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. And what is lifted up?

What does it mean to be lifted up? You know the story about this snake? The Israelites were on their journey with Moses and they were uncomfortable and the food was lousy and the accommodations were terrible. And they even said, I wish we could go back to where we were in slavery, because at least we had good meals and things like that. All that was just so typical human nature. God is taking you on a journey to change you, to bring you to something so much more than that you ever could imagine being.

And we want to go back to something more comfortable, easier, less stressful. And so what we see in that story with Moses and the serpent is all of a sudden, serpents started to appear. And serpents are kind of hidden. They come in through the grass and you can’t see them. And they bite these people and they die. And so it’s like some hidden thing is attacking them.

And so when Moses was as to put the snake on a pole, it was, look at what’s going on. Look at the sin that you’re caught up in. Look at the effects of that sin. Look at how it eats away at you. It destroys you. When you lose faith in God, you lose a source of life and you die.

It seems to me that the lifting up of the serpent was a way of saying, look at evil for what it is and what it does. And the most evil, dangerous thing we can do is turn away from the truth of who God is and reject his absolute, total, incredible, faithful love for us in our brokenness, in our awfulness, if that’s a word. So what is Jesus then saying about lifting up this cross of his crucifixion? It is saying, I want you to be aware of what I did when I died on the cross for you. I made up for every sin you will ever commit. They are no longer anything that keeps you from the presence, the love, the attention of God.

Do you believe this? And of course, Nicodemus didn’t understand redemption yet because it hadn’t happened. And so Jesus is talking about something that he can only wonder about rather than understand. But he’s saying, if you really think about it, what I’m going to do for you is going to be dumb. Way to put it, a game changer. We’re going to move from simple justice to justice and mercy.

And the mercy is the part that’s so essential for all of us to Understand, because it means that there is nothing that we can do. No action, attitude, we take, no decision we make that is opposed to our very nature that limits God’s love for us. And it’s hard for people to understand that. But that’s grace. Grace saves us. If Jesus is telling us that grace is the thing that saves us, grace is best described as the presence in our very heart of the love that God has for us proved to us in, in the crucifixion of Christ.

It changes everything and it’s just something that is at the heart of these mysteries that we prayed for at the very beginning of this liturgy when we said, let us understand fully what it is we’re celebrating so we can celebrate these mysteries that are coming that are so incredibly life giving. Jesus passion, his suffering, his acceptance of the cross, his dying on the cross, and his statement as he felt the evil of the world rejecting him. He said, father, don’t punish them, forgive them. Love them as I love them. An amazing revelation of the nature of God, who in the Old Testament is not seen as this great lover, but he fully reveals himself in Jesus. That’s the great mystery of Easter.

Closing prayer Father, we are so easily trapped in our misconceptions, our illusions, our lives. They lead to destruction both to those we love and to ourselves. So bless us with an understanding of the love that you have for us in that state of sinfulness, so that we can believe with you in our own goodness, that if we turn to you and trust in you and allow you to open our eyes to see all that is, we will find life. So bless us with this great gift, and we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. Hello, my name is Will Richie and I work for Pastoral Reflections Institute. Monsignor Fisher has asked me to share reflection on today’s homily, and I’m struck by the story of the serpents slithering through the grass, attacking us when we don’t know they’re there, putting us face to face with evil, and then the repetition of that until someone like Moses comes along, grabs the serpent, turns him into a staff and lets us know, look, this is what’s been coming after you.

This is what it looks like, see it, release it, repent and accept God’s grace and unconditional love. I’ve definitely been in that place where I’ve been stuck in the grass, watching or wondering why the snakes keep biting me. I grew up in a family where I was the oldest of four. We had a lot of rules and regulations, both in our home and at the church we attended, it almost seemed like the modeling of the Catholic Church. How the priests preached there really aligned with how my mother and father looked at the type of discipline and order that they wanted us to have in our home. I don’t know how much grace and mercy was there when we would get out of line.

I know some of you may relate being a kid and dad comes home from work and says, well, mom, how were the kids today? If one of us were upset, dad would always say, well, after dinner, I need you to go to your room. I’ll see you there. Oof. I remember how hard it was to finish eating my dinner, especially if I’m the one who committed it wrong. I remember looking at my siblings looking afraid.

At the same time, I know for a fact that our parents wanted the best for us, but it almost appeared as if we were being judged or being reared more on what we didn’t do than what we did. When I hear Monsignor saying this humbly, that God is not interested in turning away from anyone who is failing, that he wants to turn towards them, to transform them, to awaken them. It’s not always how I felt as a kid. And yet I’m reminded throughout this entire homily of the word grace and the word grace and the word grace and how that when Jesus came, we moved. He helped us move simply from a place of justice to justice and mercy because it is that grace that saves us. I think we’re all looking for a Moses who can stand and hold that serpent in his hand and say, look at it, see it and let it go.

There’s learning how to let go, to surrender, to allow God to love us where we are in all of our practices here during Lent. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program is archived and available on our website Pastoral Reflections and available anytime, anywhere and for free on our podcast Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website Pastoral Reflections Institute.

We thank you for your listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher. Produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2020.