“How comfortable are you in your life? How comfortable are you? Oftentimes in the world they’re really selling comfort. Everything we’re buying is comfort. Even in retirement they’re selling comfort. I don’t think our lives were made for comfort. I was talking to a mother the other night and she was saying how she was trying to get her son to get more involved in high school. He just got to high school and he didn’t want to do much and so she signed him up for cross country and he hated it. He hated the thought of running and just running, but by the end of the season he was surprised. He enjoyed it. He was surprised in himself that he could do more than he thought he could. Parents love their children not by purely protecting them from the world to keep them in a bubble, but by preparing them to get out of themselves. Sometimes when we grow up we forget that. We stay in our own bubble. We seek comfort at all costs and really we’re just grasping to that that we lose the fight against adversity.
In today’s Gospel Jesus has really struck a chord with not only the Jews, but now even the Greeks. Many people were coming to him now believing that he could be the Messiah and he said, ‘My glory has come.’ But then there’s the real kicker: he said, ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls and dies then it’s just a grain of wheat, but if it dies it bears great fruit.’ There’s a saying for the Marines. It says that everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die and in some ways no one wants to go through the struggle, go through the pain, the adversity. A grain of wheat, a seed is very hard. It can last a very long time, but it’s only a small little thing, but if you plant the seed into fertile soil and it breaks open a great tree can bloom from it. Great fruit can come through it. What is the seed in your life? It’s your faith. Ultimately it’s your faith. There’s seeds planted within your life, but do you just keep it? Do you keep our life in a bubble? Are you challenged? The Lord is calling us to much more to break it open to be not afraid to break it open. The very act of love, so you know the love you have for your children? Yes, you’re trying to break open that seed to see what can flourish in their life, but also even in marriage. Marriage is tough, but it is a breaking open of yourself to the other of fully giving yourself to the other and you’re realizing how much more you can be. God is calling each one of us to something more. What are the struggles of your life? What are the sacrifices of your life? Are you afraid? Is there something you can do more today to continue growing? That’s why this season of Lent in some ways it’s uncomfortable, you know fasting, extra prayer, almsgiving, it’s to break open that seed of us in our faith to bring something else out to conform our lives to God, but in the first reading today of Jeremiah God talks about a new covenant that he will make with all of us. The covenant of Moses is the one that the Jews were looking at where the Ten Commandments are written on stone tablets, but in Jeremiah it says that this new covenant will not be written on tablets, but written on your hearts. Now what is this new covenant that God is calling us to? It’s here in the Mass. In a few moments these are the words you will hear when the priest consecrates the bread and the wine into the body and blood. ‘Take this chalice, the blood, the new and everlasting covenant.’ The new and everlasting covenant, that is right here, but not only that now when you come to receive communion the priest says, ‘The body of Christ’ and you say ‘Amen.’ and then you consume it. Now the law isn’t written outside of you, it’s really written within your own heart. This new covenant God calls us to is right here in the Mass, but not only that it starts first with the breaking of the seed of your faith, the sacrifices of your life and conforming it to Christ because before all of that happens what do we do? We have the preparation of the gifts where you bring your gifts, sacrifices to the altar. That’s the spiritual sacrifices you bring, you bring to the altar to sacrifice in this new covenant and then to write it on your hearts. That’s why the priest says when everyone else stands, ‘May my sacrifice and yours be acceptable to God the Father almighty.’ so it’s all linked here within this new covenant written in our hearts and it’s alive today here in the Mass and every Mass you come to, but it does, it takes us breaking open that seed and seeing what fruit will bear from it from the graces of God. So as you come today before the Eucharist today where Christ is truly present before you in this new covenant, let us have the strength and the courage to break and open the seeds of our faith to let the words of God and the Eucharist and the sacraments nurture it so that it may bear great fruit in your life. Amen.”