HOMILY: 4TH SUNDAY OF LENT (LAETARE), YEAR B 

HOMILY: 4TH SUNDAY OF LENT (LAETARE), YEAR B 

BY: Rev Fr Stephen ‘Dayo Osinkoya

2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23
Psalm 136:1-6
Ephesians 2:4-10
John 3:14-21

At a point in my life I asked myself “why do we have to attend Mass on Sundays and celebrate the great feasts and seasons of the Church repeatedly, year in, year out?” In our first reading, the book of Chronicles tells us that God tirelessly sent His prophets to the people of Israel to warn them of the imminent wrath (2Chr. 36:14-16). So I said to myself, “If God is never tired of coming to us through the prophets and at last through His son, who also after completing his mission on earth charged his disciples to continue the same mission to the ends of the earth; then, why should we be tired of returning to this our loving God each time we are called upon?!

ALSO RECOMMENDED: 4TH SUNDAY HOMILY, YEAR B – LENT 

In today’s first reading we learn that God inspired a non-Jew, Cyrus, King of Persia, to release the Jews from their captivity in Babylon and allow them to return to their native land. Not only that, but Cyrus was also inspired to rebuild God’s house in Jerusalem! This was quite amazing, even more so when we learn that the Jews had been unfaithful to God.

On this LAETARE Sunday, as always, JOY is the theme. Joy because we are halfway through Lent and thus very close to the glory of Easter. We rejoice also because God tirelessly seeks our salvation and our happiness in this world as well, such that even when with stubbornness we turn away from His presence, His love is always seeking and calling us and when he finds us, in repentance, He brings us back to His presence.

Beloved in Christ, sin prevents movement toward God. It causes us to wallow in darkness and captivity. It makes us spiritually flabby. Like the Jews in the first reading, we too often suffer from our infidelities to God and our sin makes us become even more indifference to God. But the fire of God’s love cannot be extinguished.

St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians makes us understand that because God’s love for us is immense and His mercy generous, “He brought us to life with Christ…” (Eph. 2:4) and by His grace we have been saved from the necessary consequence of our infidelities -eternal death. This is the cause of our joy.

So in the Gospel Jesus speaks to us all as he did Nicodemus, that for us to have eternal life, which Jesus himself has worked for us upon the cross, we must believe!

When Jesus says “whoever believes” he’s not talking about merely the acceptance of a series of correctly articulated dogmas like we find in the Creed or the catechism, though these are helpful. But what Jesus is really talking about is where our heart is, how we live our lives, how our will conformed to God’s will, basing every decision on the answer to the question, “what would Jesus do?” because it is in him that we have eternal life.

Belief is a response -a positive response to God’s love, mercy and grace. It is a return from the field of sin, an exit from the darkness of the soul toward the light shinning forth from the Cross of Christ.

FOR SIMILAR HOMILY, CLICK HERE >>>