Father Ken’s Message:
Good afternoon, everyone and again welcome to the Catholic Cathedral of Sapporo. It is nice to have you all here with our community today. This is the Fourth Sunday of Lent. The readings from the Bible today are about our spiritual sickness and our spiritual cure. I imagine it is safe to say that everyone in the church this afternoon has been sick once or twice in their lives. My oldest memories of being sick as a child with a cold is my mother’s cure consisting of chicken noodle soup with crackers and ginger ale and with permission to watch TV while staying home from school. Mom’s recipe for cure worked every time.
Each year in Lent as Catholics we stop our lives to do a spiritual health assessment of our hearts and souls. Our mothers and fathers knew what we needed to recover from childhood physical sicknesses and our spiritual Father in Heaven knows what we our hearts and souls need to recover spiritual health. We have each been born to two sets of parents, our Mom and Dads, and God our Father. From Mom and Dad we received DNA which predicted some health problems we might encounter in life. From God we inherited intelligence, free will, everlasting life, and love. Our free will is often the source of our spiritual illnesses, i.e. Adam and Eve choosing to follow the devil. In the 21st century we modern people are also tempted to believe that we are self-sufficient and able to work out our salvation by ourselves. Probably many of you like myself have heard the excuse from and family members that they are spiritual and not religious. They use it as their excuse for not going to church on Sunday. I apologize for all the problems of the Catholic Church. I am also a Catholic and I understand the Catholic Church as a community built of people and not of stones. Cement does not keep us together, love does. I come to church every Sunday because of love. I come to strengthen my love for God and all the people in my life, including all of you who I still do not know that well.
This spiritual illness is the problem in the First Reading this morning with the Jews in Jerusalem that lead to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (Iraq) invading Jerusalem 600 years before the birth of Jesus and taking all the Jewish people to his country for 70 years as slaves. It is another repeat of the Adam and Eve story because of their apathy for God and religion.
1000 years before Babylon the same problem happened in the desert between Moses and the Jewish people who fled Egypt from slavery. Because of hardship in the desert life, they gave up on God to the point that they wanted to return to be slaves in Egypt. Snakes attacked them making their lives even worse and Moses prayed to God for help and he made the first version of the salvific Cross to save them with the help of God who designed it. Jesus used the example of Moses’ cross to explain his own Cross on Good Friday to save humanity from our sins of choosing the devil over God, from choosing hate over love, from choosing death over life. The key point of the Catholic religion is not about obeying picayune rules or memorizing the Bible, it is about deepening our relationship with the God in Jesus and the Jesus in one another and growing our power of love. We do this by caring about one another even though we might not know each other very well. We are all the brothers and sisters of Jesus and the sons and daughters of God. We are family. Our Sunday Mass is like our Sunday Family get-together meal together where we share our lives with one another and support one-another with brotherly and sisterly love. That is our Catholic religion, we believe in one another. And the Cross is our common symbol of love. I tell my Japanese students at the college where I teach that it resembles the “plus sign” or the “positive sign” meaning anything is possible if you have love. Please take a cross from the basket outside on the table and wear it with pride until the end of Lent to tell the world us Catholics care about one another.
Finally, before I shut up, I just wanted to talk about the snake a little bit that Jesus referred to in the Gospel today in his mentioning Moses. Firstly, the snake Moses used has nothing to do with the devil in this episode. The snake is mentioned 50 times in the Bible. The first time and the last time the snake is mentioned in the Bible the devil was the topic (see Genesis chapter 3 and Revelation chapter 20). Snakes to ancient people were feared but they were also used in ancient medical treatment so for the people to stare at the bronze snake on the cross was a sign of healing to people in that time. Moses made his famous cross in 1400 B.C. and 1000 years later the Greeks used Moses’ idea in their mythology with the god of healing Asclepius. The symbol Moses created has survived over 3624 years and is the symbol of WHO, World Medical Association, local doctor’s and nursing organizations, on drug stores, on uniforms of medical workers and painted on ambulances. The Cross has crossed over from the religious realm to the secular realm as a symbol and sign of caring and love for one another. That is pretty cool, I think.
And finally, finally I want to talk about the power of seeing symbols. We all know what happens when we see the Golden Arches of McDonald’s….we salivate for a Big Mac. Similarly, we Christians and Catholics might say we feel the same about seeing the Cross in churches or seeing the Holy Eucharist even before receiving it…the seeing of the Cross and the Holy Eucharist already has a healing and empowering effective upon our broken spirit. That is why the Jewish people in the desert looking at the Moses’ cross survived the snake bites. That is spirituality. My friends as we approach the end of Lent let us remember to give thanks to the guy who made the Cross the real symbol of salvation, Jesus. Sometime this week let us each go to a church and sit looking at the Cross and thank Jesus for saving us and loving us to death. Thank you very much.
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