“First of all it’s wonderful to see so many of you being able to return to celebrate the Eucharist as a community as well as those that we welcome through the virtual streaming, but it is great that we are able to gather together and I would mention that during the 8:15 and 10 o’clock Masses we are live streaming to the parish hall as well particularly since we can’t use the cry room and other things, you can take advantage of that area as well, but it’s great to be able to enter into this season of Lent and today what I’d like to do is to talk about the overall path or journey of Jesus and of each and every one of us. The life of Jesus is really seen as a great exodus and we’re all familiar with the first exodus where the Israelites were subject to slavery in Egypt under the Pharaoh and they labored there and being subject to slavery there finally God delivers them as they go through the waters of the Red Sea and they go out into the desert there and they are in the desert there for a long time and they experience many temptations and unfortunately they fell so often. They rebelled against God and yet they were called back to conversion and then finally they are able to come into the promised land and to share in the abundance of that promise of God and to enter into what we call the Holy Land today.
Jesus’ life is also one of an exodus because even the Israelites look forward to a new exodus one that would not be from material slavery, personal slavery in sense of physical slavery, but rather from the slavery of sin and so Jesus enters into our humanity through the waters of baptism. He accepts upon himself all of our own sinfulness although he himself was without sin and he journeys out into the desert as we see in the Gospel today he journeys out into the desert and is tempted as the Israelites were before, but he is faithful to God. He does not submit himself to sin, but rather his willingness to do God’s will to be faithful to reject materialism to reject power to reject the sin of presumption those actions of Jesus and then eventually through his death and resurrection he enters into the fullness of the promised land which is the Kingdom of Heaven, the fullness of life with God for all eternity where he has taken his place at the right hand of the Father through his death and resurrection and of Jesus’ whole life is seen as this exodus once again from slavery into freedom, but that is also the model for our life that we are journeying this exodus as well. We were born into a state of original sin of alienation from God, but through the waters of baptism we have been brought deliverance. We have a whole new life, but right now we are out in the desert. We’re out in the desert. We are experiencing the ups and the downs that it’s not always easy to walk that journey and there is temptations that we experience and unfortunately sometimes more like the Israelites than Jesus we can embrace sin, but we are called to recognize that our life is ultimately a journey to eternal life with God and therefore we are challenged to reject the power of evil, the power of sin within our life and instead to be embraced ever more fully by Christ Jesus and that’s really the journey of our life is striving to recognize, yes we’re still in the desert. We have the bad example of the Israelites and we have the beautiful example of Jesus and it’s that continual challenge that we have is to walk the way of Jesus to be ever more faithful and to recognize that yes sometimes we do sin just as the Israelites did and they needed forgiveness and so we need forgiveness as well to have the humility to acknowledge the fact of sin to have the humility to allow Christ to reach out and to touch us with his healing grace that we may continue this journey until we reach our final goal, life everlasting.
Just recently I read this statement that made so much sense. ‘There’s no saint without a past and no sinner without a future.’ It’s an interesting statement. There is no saint without a past. Most of the saints had their moments of weakness, their moments in which they rejected God, but they converted and there’s no sinner who doesn’t have a future a future of new life, a future of forgiveness, a future of reconciliation, a future of eternal life. That’s what we’re called to recognize within our life. How we live this journey of the Israelites? We live the journey of Jesus. We live this journey in our daily lives as we seek to be prayerful and open to God’s grace.”