Saturday in the 2nd Week of Great Lent
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Saint Paul says in his prayer : “Now may the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, that great Shepherd of the sheep, … make you complete in every good work to do His will” (Hebrews 13:20). Indeed, the Lord is able to help us perform every good work. He is more than able to help us to do everything that He wants us to do. However, in every case there is one thing that stands in the way. The Lord is able, but are we ourselves able to let Him work His work in us ? Are we ourselves able to let Him ? Actually, we are not, not instantly. Even before we are truly able to let Him work His good work in us, transform us, transfigure us and raise us, we have to be ready to ask Him to help us.
When we have asked Him to help us, we open the door to Him to come into our hearts and enable us to ask Him to do more, and to let Him work His work in us. Why am I saying this ? The simple fact is that we have to realise that we do not enter the Kingdom of Heaven on our own strength. We do not enter the Kingdom of Heaven simply because we live such a good life. We do not enter the Kingdom of Heaven for any other reason than that God loves us, and He forgives us. All that He wants from us is for us to love Him back, and to live a life that shows this love. Living the Christian life is very simple and straightforward. It is, however, not so very easy. The demands are few, but not easy : love and forgiveness. Loving, at least in the way God wants us to love is not all that easy. We must have His help to be able to love in the way that He wants us to love. If we are not ready to ask for that help, if we are not ready to let Him work with us and in us, if we are not ready to co-operate, He is not going to make an invasion. He gave us freedom, which is part of our being made in His image. We are free to reject, just as Adam and Eve were free to reject, and they did. So we, as well, are free to reject the Lord and His help. If we want to follow the devil’s path, then we can deceive ourselves into thinking that we are good enough to get into the Kingdom of Heaven by ourselves.
If we want to live in the Kingdom, we have to remember, first of all, that the Lord is all-powerful and all-loving. He loves me. He loves us all, each of us – all. He wants us to be living with Him forever in the Kingdom. It is up to you and to me to take those steps that will help Him work in us. One of those steps is being here right now, today, praising Him, standing here in the Kingdom as we are always when we praise Him, standing in the Lord’s presence, serving Him, united with our brothers and sisters who have gone before us.
On this Saturday, we pray for all our brothers and sisters who have fallen asleep a long time ago at the very beginning of this parish and even beyond that. We pray for them because we are not separated from them. We are united with them in the Body of Christ. As we stand here today, so our brothers and sisters who have gone before us are standing together with us in the Kingdom and offering their praises to the Lord. We all offer to the Lord our praise, and the Lord feeds us all with Himself, with His Body and His Blood. As we continue to ask Him to come into our hearts and to continue to work in us, He works little changes in us little by little. We become stronger, better able to love in the right way. We become less and less selfish, more and more caring of other people, more and more concerned with Him, also. After a time of this co-operative living, when we look back on ourselves as we were some years ago, we can actually see that the Lord has done something (although we cannot see everything that the Lord has done). However, the Lord is merciful and He allows us to see that there are some changes for the good. We can immediately say : “Thank God that He helped me out of that mess. I did not think that I could come along that far”. “The God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, that great Shepherd of the sheep”, who loves us and knows each one of us by name (and then some), will make us perfect if we work with Him. If we let Him, He will make us perfect and give us not only the image but the likeness of Himself.
Let us commend ourselves and each other to the Lord, and let His love work in us and amongst us. May that love build us, all of us together, up into the Body of Christ. Let us be transformed by Him, and let us glorify in our lives the all-holy Trinity : Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.