SOMEONE SENT me last night a digital poster with a silhouette of the cross on the foreground and the rising sun in the background. It came with a caption that says, “Only Jesus could bridge heaven and earth with just two pieces of wood.” I smiled when I read the caption. I said maybe he was sending me the poster because he heard me last Friday talking about the two lines of the cross as signifying the two most important commandments according to Jesus: the vertical—signifying wholehearted Love of God, and the horizontal—signifying Love of Neighbor as oneself. I found myself saying, “How true.” The cross is indeed our bridge.
This is the good news that I wish to share to you today, as we celebrate the fourth Sunday of Lent. In the Christian Catholic tradition, we call it the “Laetare” Sunday, or the Sunday of Rejoicing. Why should we be rejoicing if we are about to commemorate the passion and death of Christ, which the cross is supposed to symbolize? Well, you have your answer in today’s Gospel. The cross is not about suffering and death. It is not a morbid message. It is a good news. And the good news is: there’s a bridge.
Doesn’t that remind you of an old song about “Bridges” sung by Diane Reeves? Here’s what the song says:
There’s a bridge to tomorrow
There’s a bridge to the past
There’s a bridge made of sorrow
That I pray will not last
There’s a bridge made of color
In the sky high above
And I pray that there must be
Bridges made out of love.
The song says, I PRAY THAT THERE MUST BE… And my answer to the prayer is, “Don’t say there must be. THERE IS a bridge made of love. We call it the Cross of Christ.” In John’s Gospel, the cross does not stand for defeat; it stands for victory. That is why Catholic Christianity celebrates a feast we call “Exaltation of the Cross.” We don’t mean to glorify a morbid symbol which was a cruel instrument of torture. What we glorify rather is God’s eternal love that is willing to pay the price, even if it would mean being ready to suffer and die. It is about an unconditional love that is willing to go down to hell for the sake of the beloved.
Today’s Gospel is my answer to many Catholics who still think of God as a punishing God—as a God who loves only good and righteous people and who judges the sinners and the undeserving. This, after all, is the most common presupposition of most religions about salvation: a basic sense of retribution—reward for the good and punishment for the wicked.
If there is anyone who has challenged that, it is Jesus. And it is what John proclaims in today’s Gospel: “For God so loved the world….” People usually memorize only v. 16. I usually suggest that they also include v. 17. It says, “God did not send his son to the world to condemn the world but to save it.” In short, it is not God’s business to condemn; his mission is to save! If he must give up his life, he’d gladly do it, for love of us. There is a term for that kind of salvation that has to be paid for a huge price: redemption. It is what the cross stands for.
I think this is the whole background to what St. Paul is telling us in Romans 8:31 “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Then he goes out of his way to strike out all the possible answers to his question. In v. 32 he is as it were saying, How can you even think that he will be against you when “He did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him?” He goes on and says, “Who will bring up charges against you?” God? Come on “It is God who acquits us.” And then he asks again, “So, who are you afraid of? Who will condemn you? The Son of God? But his whole mission was precisely to offer his life for our redemption!”
And then he drops the most important question like a bombshell. “Who can separate us from the love of God?” And his answer is, “Nothing!” Why? Because of his confidence in the love of God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ. This is a very radical statement. If separation from the love of God means HELL, that is almost as good as saying “God will never damn you into hell!” Is he saying there is no hell? Oh no. There is hell, except that no one will throw us into hell except ourselves.
St. John is saying it too in today’s Gospel. He says, we condemn ourselves by our own disbelief, our own stubbornness of heart, our own deliberate choice to stay in darkness than live in the light. Nothing can separate us from the love of God except ourselves, our refusal to respond to the love of God, our choice to live only for ourselves. But here’s the good news; even hell is not beyond God’s reach, in case we find ourselves there. (And I assure you we are such experts in making a hell out of our lives on earth!) Don’t we say in the creed that we profess every Sunday, “HE DESCENDED INTO HELL”?
You want to understand what hell is like? Just look at the cross! Does that look like heaven to you? To be condemned to death by the very people you wish to save? To be treated as a criminal for the sheer crime of loving unconditionally? The good news is, there’s a bridge not just between heaven and earth. There’s also already a bridge between heaven and hell. It is the cross.
A few days ago, I received a gift from Bishop Broderick Pabillo. It was the day before my birthday so I took it to be a birthday gift. It was a metal pendant cross on a chain with the name of Jesus engraved on it. It came with a letter explaining what it was for. That he was encouraging Filipinos as we celebrate the 500th Year of the Arrival of Christianity in the Philippines by proudly wearing our crosses, not as a fashion statement but as a theological statement.
I agree with him. On that day of March 31, 1521, when the first Mass was celebrated on the shore of Limasawa, the very first Christian icon that our ancestors were introduced to was THE CROSS. The bearers of this cross, the Spaniards, also brought with them another cross—the cross of colonial rule, which we eventually repudiated. We eventually threw away the cross of oppression and embraced the true cross of liberty, the cross of redemption, the cross of God’s unconditional love, the cross that gives us human beings our true dignity as sons and daughters of God.
We look back and say to ourselves “Despite all the pain that we have had to go through, we will forever be grateful for this cross. We will no longer be motivated by the fear of a punishing God. We will no longer be afraid of the deep chasms that need to be traversed to get to the hereafter. Why? Because there’s a bridge made of love; and it is the cross of Christ.”
(Homily for the 4th Sunday of Lent, 14 March 2021, Jn 3:14-21)
