The World Needs Christians to Be True Transformed Believers

Yesterday I remembered this reflection from Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, during Holy Week in 2020. We were isolated from one another and from God if we were sitting in our homes in fear of the pandemic and not trusting that Jesus is victorious even when the church doors were shut to most of us.

In the face of evil — this pandemic — many people, probably most, will not repent of their sin, for they are blind to their own guilt. In this most holy of weeks, however, Christians — who should not be blind to the world’s sin or their own, are called to be today’s courageous Esther, supplicating Daniel, and interceding Moses.

We can repeat their prayers or make them a model for our own.  We should be the ones who repent for our sin and the world’s, and in that ardent repentance should beg our loving and ever-faithful Father to free the world, in his mercy, from this pandemic.

Jesus declared, replicating Moses, that as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must he be lifted up, that whoever believes that he is “I Am” will have eternal life (John 3:14-15 & 8:28).  During the sacred Triduum, we are to behold, in repentance, faith and love, the lifted-up crucified and risen Jesus, he who is the great life-giving I Am.

That was Pope Francis’s message in his recent Urbi et Orbi blessing.  He walked us to the foot of the Cross so that we might behold the crucified Jesus. He blessed us with a cruciform monstrance that contained the risen and life-giving Eucharistic Jesus.  He imparted Jesus’ blessing upon the world that is suffering an evil beyond its imagining, in order to lead the world and the Church back to Jesus — a world and a Church in dire need of repentance and faith, that desperately need the assurance and joy of his resurrection.

On this day, Holy Thursday, we commemorate, we actually re-enact, Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples.  In this supper, Jesus washed the feet of his apostles.  Today, however, because of the pandemic, that will not take place.  Nonetheless, as we watch “The Mass of the Lord’s Supper” on our televisions and computers, we can wash the world’s sinful feet with our own repentant-tears.

We can beseech our Lord Jesus to pour out upon the world, from his pierced side, the cleansing water of his Holy Spirit, so that, in the coming months, the now faithless-world can once again enter opened churches to receive, as newborn Christians, his life-giving risen body and blood — the medicine of immortality.

In our “normal” two years later, is there any repentance? God may have allowed the pandemic so we would remember Him — that He is our only certainty.

Good Friday and Holy Saturday can be brutal if we wallow in our sinfulness. We are sinners. And He loves us and wants to save us if we let Him! That’s the good in Good Friday. It’s more awesome than anything this world offers.

If you put yourself in the position of receiving the love of God on the Cross today, we might just get on a healthy road to repentance. The road the world needs us to be on.

This might be helpful with that: