Once again, Happy St. Patty’s Day! It’s fun to see so many of you dressed in green. My nod to the Irish is this little button that has a green stripe across it and says: “If you’re not Irish, fake it!” Last Sunday, a number of our proud parents watched with great delight as their children participated in the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Philadelphia. I enjoyed watching some of it on television and I caught it just as our group came on. It was great to see these young kids dance with such precision and grace. The human body exhibits such poise in motion because it operates from its own center of balance, a fixed gravitational point around which the head, torso and limbs are in constant self-correcting coordination. A skillful dancer reveals just how breathtakingly beautiful this poise can be.
In spiritual terms, the heart is our moral center of balance. Just as children learn to dance as they watch their instructors and practice the same moves with increasing ability themselves but only become accomplished dancers as they internalize the music and rhythm and all the complicated steps, so moral formation begins with external factors – the example we receive from our family, schooling and cultural expectations – but it reaches maturity only when it is internalized and fully integrated. In today’s first reading, we hear Jeremiah describe the new covenant that God forms with his people not by imposing the law but by “writing it on their hearts.” For hundreds of years, God’s people had been learning the law written on stone tablets, but now they would take the law and internalize it, writing on their hearts. You will remember that for the people of the ancient Near East, the heart did not symbolize love as it does for us today. For them, it was the seat of wisdom and the deepest place of our identity.
Most of Jesus’ life was spent preparing for his final years of public ministry. The Gospels give us only a glimpse of his early years, but from what happens during his public life we can conclude that his hidden years were spent forming the heart he operated out of in his preaching and healing work. He had already gone to the heart of the human struggle for meaning, and “he learned obedience from what he suffered” as we hear proclaimed so eloquently in today’s second reading.
When the “Greeks” – that is, converts to Judaism from other nations who were in Jerusalem for Passover – told Philip they wanted to meet Jesus, it was because they had been drawn to Jesus as the model of Greek art and philosophy, a human being in perfect symmetry and balance. Yet this encounter also highlights the clash between Greek perfection and the mystery of the crucifixion, what St. Paul called a “stumbling block for Jews and foolishness to gentiles.”
Jesus does not spare these seekers, but tells the parable of the “seed that falls to the ground and dies” that we just heard as the only path to fulfillment. “Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will save it” we hear him declare in today’s gospel.
So many in our society have embraced the notion of personal perfection through exercise, diet and physical beauty. Our consumer culture promises this perfection in the countless products it sells to give us the lifestyle that passes for a full, satisfying life. What else is there?
Jesus shocks his visitors with the paradox that he himself is about to embrace: death on a cross. It is by his execution that he will establish the fixed measure and still point of the new universe: self-emptying love. Not self-centered love but self-emptying love. Jesus reveals God as the One who is the center point of his life and he empties his heart into the world even as the world rejects the divine offer of selfless love. God’s unconditional love transforms enemies into friends, cleanses the heart of selfishness and restores the center of balance to a world disjointed and disoriented by human self-centeredness. Jesus will be lifted up — crucified and raised — and will draw everything to himself. Jews and gentiles, all of us who want to live full lives, are invited to follow Jesus’ example.
Lent is a school for learning how to walk – and, indeed, dance – in balance again. It is a time for us to give our hearts – that is, the core of our being – to the healer and our minds to the teacher, so that everything will come into balance and focus. This is what it means to be a child of God. If we only want to be self-satisfied, we will postpone our own arrival at true fulfillment. A life of generous love and mutual forgiveness leads to the web of relationships that imitate the inner life of God. This is where we should be headed and where we will find happiness, both in this world and in eternity. This is the heart of the matter and the secret of life. Let us conclude our Lenten journey learning these lessons well as we to join our Lord, the center of our lives, who by his death and resurrection, leads us to new life!