Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
Jer 31:31-34;
Ps 51;
Heb 5:7-9;
Jn 12:20-33
BIBLICAL-MISSIONARY COMMENTARY
To Bring People to Jesus, the One Who Is Lifted Up and Who Draws All to Himself.
With this fifth Sunday of Lent, we are approaching the final phase of the Lenten Journey. It is actually the last “ordinary” Sunday of Lent, because the next one will be Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week, which culminates with the Easter Triduum. Therefore, we can already see on the horizon Easter, which celebrates Christ’s passage from death to life, from the world to the Father, with His triumph over death and sins. In such a liturgical and temporal context, after last week’s contemplation of the sublime mystery of God’s love in giving His Son to be lifted up for the life of humanity, today we are invited to deepen, through the Gospel just proclaimed, the fundamental aspects of Jesus’ mission of raising up, for which the hour has come, as He solemnly and publicly proclaimed. Such a deepening will not only help us to (re)discover the hidden meaning of Jesus’ Passion and Resurrection in order to prepare ourselves for the coming Holy Week, but will also help us to (re)see our own vocation as Christians, that is, as disciples of Christ, called to follow the Master and to collaborate in His mission. This is shown by three images in the Gospel passage we have just heard: the disciple Philip, the seed fallen to the ground, and the Son lifted up who draws all.
1. The Disciple Philip and the “Greeks” Eager to See Jesus
The “Greeks” who presented Philip with a request to see Jesus look like those non-Israelites, “Gentiles,” who converted to Judaism, since they “had come to worship” at the Temple in Jerusalem for Passover, the “feast” par excellence. The mention of Philip here hints at the importance of this figure among Jesus’ closest disciples. Indeed, in John’s Gospel, this disciple was the first called by Jesus with an explicit invitation-command “Follow me!” Later, it was Philip who brought his friend Nathanael to Jesus, thus sharing with the latter the joy of discovering the Messiah in person (Jn 1:43-45). Jesus conversed with Philip in the episode of the multiplication of bread, asking about the need to starve the people who followed Him. Interestingly, on that occasion, the disciple Andrew also appeared alongside Philip, just as in today’s Gospel account, which shows Philip going to Andrew and these two go to present the request of the Greeks to Jesus together. It will be Philip during the Last Supper who will ask Jesus to show the Father; this “provoked” a rebuke from Jesus (“Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip?” Jn 14:9a) and the revelation of a dizzying truth to be “seen” with the eyes of faith: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. […] I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (Jn 14:9b-11).
In the light of all this, we can see in Philip the particular figure, even the type, of the disciple-missionary of Christ, to whom the early Christian tradition, as seen in the Gospel of John, reserved a special memory and honor. This type of disciple, on the one hand, was in constant communion with Jesus in order to grow in the knowledge of his Master and Lord, despite all his limitations and distractions. On the other hand, he brought his friends and acquaintances, like the “Greeks” in our text, to Jesus, helping them to personally meet and listen to the Lord-Master who speaks to the hearts of all, revealing more and more of the hidden aspects of divine life.
2. The Seed Which Fell to the Ground and Its “Hour”
Hearing the request of the Greeks through Philip and Andrew, Jesus’ answer was a little strange, if not out of place. But it was only seemingly so. In fact, without saying yes or no to the request to see Him physically, the Lord immediately indicates the way, the perspective, to see Him, to look beyond all appearances at His person, His existence and His mission, more deeply with the eyes of faith. This “open” revelation, although in metaphorical language, is accompanied by an important statement about the coming of His hour, never before made in Jesus’ public ministry: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”
This hour of His is that of glorification, a process similar to that of a seed that has fallen to the ground, as Jesus later solemnly specifies, with the initial double Amen-Amen, characteristic of His style: “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” It is a beautiful and understandable image because it is taken from everyday life and speaks a universal truth that even a Vietnamese farmer understands. Therefore, there is no need for explanation; one only needs to taste and contemplate the profound truth behind such an image about the destiny-mission, on this earth, of Jesus, Son of God and Son of Man, This, as Jesus later reveals, will also be the vocation of each of His disciples: the courage to lose one’s life (“hate” in the Semitic language) for God in order to have divine life. We have here the statement that is also attested in the other Gospel traditions; it most likely reflects a thought that was very dear to Jesus, who impressed it on the minds of the early disciples.
This is certainly not an easy vocation, that of dying in order to bear much fruit. It was not a moment without temptations and internal struggles for Jesus, who in that moment felt “troubled” in His soul, a reflection of what will happen in Gethsemane, according to the account in the other Gospels. But the mutual love between Jesus and the Father, and therefore their intimate union, was the strength for Jesus to accept this hour with obedience and filial trust, boldly declaring: “It was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” This last request of Jesus curiously mirrors the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer that He taught His disciples: Father [our], hallowed be thy name (so much so that some biblical scholars believe that Jesus began the Our Father here and was then interrupted by the Father’s voice from heaven!) Thus, the Our Father that we recite, this one prayer that Jesus left for His disciples, will perhaps always be for them, in a mystical way, the prayer of and in that “hour”-the culmination of the mission of offering Oneself for the life of humanity out of love, in union with Christ the Lord.
3. “And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself”
For Jesus, the hour of the supreme sacrifice of His own life will be the hour of the divine glorification, that is, the revelation of the glory of God, when His nature will be revealed as great in love and rich in mercy for humanity. It is the hour of the new covenant between God and His people, in which God forgives their sins, as prophesied by Jeremiah (second reading). With this power of love, God draws everyone to Himself in Christ, lifted up from the earth, according to what is proclaimed in Jer 31:3 “With age-old love I have loved you; so I have kept my mercy toward you” (which we reflected on in the previous commentary).
In this perspective, disciples are called to unite themselves to Christ in their lives, to let him live in them and to attract everyone through them. They have a “destiny” to be “lifted up from the earth” by and in love, like their Master and Lord. Indeed, just as Christ is the seed that falls to the earth and dies to bring forth much fruit, so he pointed out to his disciples the same sublime vocation: “I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain” (Jn 15:16). And just as Christ, raised from the earth, attracts all to Him through the mysterious power of divine love, so His disciples are sent to radiate this power of attraction to all through their sacrifice of life.
We are invited, then, in this last phase of Lent, to rediscover and continue our journey as disciples-missionaries of Christ, also following the example of the Apostle Philip, and thus worthily venerating, with the first Christians, this outstanding figure of Christianity. His relics, together with those of James the lesser, are especially venerated in the Basilica of the Holy Apostles in Rome. (I write these lines with much emotion and gratitude to the Lord for the grace to now dwell in our own Franciscan Monastery next to this Basilica. I wish everyone the opportunity to come here on pilgrimage to venerate the Apostle Philip and all the Apostles and, through their intercession, to renew our apostolic zeal in our lives as disciples-missionaries of Christ). St. Philip and all the Apostles of Christ, pray for us! Amen.
