Dear Parish Family,

We have now entered the most cherished and sacred time of the year, as we as Church commemorate Passiontide. It is here that the stark reality of the Lord’s Passion is encountered through the lens of Holy Week. News Flash! This is not just another ordinary week. Stop yourself dead, before beginning it as such! We must echo the question of Jesus “Will you be my disciple? “Will You! It's not a rhetorical question, it never was! It’s not a redirect for the faint of heart, nor the one that lives a compartmentalized life. It’s the life of the cross, a life filled with convictions and deep conversion. This is the life of a Christian, not one caught up in petty incidentals.

This Sunday we are reminded how quickly things can change. People cheer and wave palm branches and call Jesus King and then we hear the story of His suffering and death. That same crowd that praised Him calls for Him to be crucified. Sometimes we do the same thing in our own lives with those that we call friends. Lent will soon be ending and Holy Week has begun. It brings both joy and deep sorrow. We now walk with Jesus in His final days before His Death on the Cross.

To know where we are going, we must know where we have been. This is the plight of embracing this Fifth Sunday of Lent, knowing full well we began in the cross marked upon our heads by the ashes that remind us of our human nature and our mortality. Lent causes us to think about the grim realities of our fate, that we are going to spend eternity somewhere. Lent is the reminder of our call to conversion by way of confession and penance.

How many of us wish that we could bring back a loved one after they have died? If you listened to the readings, this weekend, that is just what happened to Martha and Mary, the two sisters of Lazarus. When he became gravely ill, they sent a messenger to Jesus to let Him know, with the hope that Jesus would come immediately to heal him. Instead of rushing there Jesus delayed and Lazarus died. Can you imagine the pain and hurt they felt thinking that if Jesus had just been there, their brother would not have died? We might ask, “ if these were friends of Jesus why did he not go right away”? We, like them, at times, pray, and we wait in earnest for God to help us.

This week we are asked to see in a new way just like God does. God sees people differently than we do. We look at the outer person first, but God looks deeper and knows what really matters. In our society and in time of Jesus, the elder son was usually the one to carry on with the family name, or the family business, but this week we learn that God has chosen David, the youngest and smallest to be a king. In the reading this week we also hear that Jesus healed a man that was born blind to see.

This Fourth Sunday of Lent brings us to the silver- lining, as we return to the liturgical color rose for the simplicity of the joy that is in our midst. It is through the paschal mystery in sharing in the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ that we know that joy is truly present in our midst, and as a result we rejoice in it. Rejoice in the Lord always again I say Rejoice! Who among us could not manage a sprinkle of joy, because we know we are turning the corner toward the most joyful and glorious event for which Jesus conquers sin and death, by overcoming the grave. We now can see what is ahead of us on the horizon, the sun is rising and upon us is the dawning of a new day!

This week we are reminded that God is with us, when we are tired, in need or unsure. The readings focus on faith, conversion and God's desire to fill us with new life. We hear about people who feel empty and thirsty, but God gives them what they truly need. God listens to their cries with love and care. He guided Moses to strike a rock so that water would flow out even though others were doubting God's presence and even quarreling with Moses.

Now in this third week of Lent, we connect at the beginning of our journey with the cross of ash we received upon our heads, in recognizing the invitation from Jesus we receive, and how Esther we are to be marked by him and for him.

1. We have been invited to bear the cross of the Lord, and to bear it boldly. We say yes in a radical way to his call, "will you be my disciple" It is by the cross that we identify with Christ, and his cross as a device of torture, shame, and execution, but his cross becomes our gateway to redemption and eternal life.

This week God calls people to trust Him. In each reading we see someone stepping forward with faith. Abram leaves his home; the disciples follow Jesus up the mountain and Paul tells Timothy to keep going even when life is hard. Lent is a time that we need to listen and follow even if it is in ways that we do not expect, or when it is hard. We should not stay in one place; we are called to move forward with hope and with faith, that God is leading us somewhere good. Have you noticed that when God wants to meet people in a special way He does it on a Mountain?

In these first Sundays of Lent since Ash Wednesday, we have come from being marked in the cross, accepting our mortality, and deciding to be the disciple Christ is calling us to be, and following him. Today there is a shift, as we enter the transfiguration, and we ascend the mountain to witness the Lord in all his glory. Scripture has a way of skipping us through these aspects of Christ's life, not concerned so much about chronological order, but the order of illumination of how such parts of the Gospel coincide with the context of the season of faith we are in, and how they illuminate in us the message of redemption.