We have entered what Sacred Tradition calls Passiontide where we notice, through the Liturgy of the Word in our daily Masses, that the opposition to Our Lord grows ever more virulent and poisonous. Our Lord has stirred up an opposition of vipers and snakes who spit poison, set traps to bismirch his character and to pull down his reputation, and engage in statements that are provocative and insulting so as to make him slip up or and say something that could turn the crowds against him or bring down on his head the wrath of the Romans. Needless to say, he doesn’t! However, the city of Jerusalem, its streets and its squares are growing darker and there seems like a nimbus cloud of dense and heavy air that crackles with hatred and threat as beings with purple leather wings flit around the just, the sinner and the wicked looking for their prey and their instruments in this Holy City! It is a drama that continues down to our times too!

Today, we also notice that our statues and crucifixes are covered in a mantle of purple and for us they seem to hint at shrouds of death, fore-shadowings of thunder storms of trouble and tribulation and veils of hidden purposes, hidden plots and hidden mysteries yet unfathomed. It is as if the season of Lent has cast a purple mantle over both Church and State, Nations and Continents, Communications and Gatherings such that some have had their eyes and ears veiled, some have grief overtake them as they have had their loved ones shrouded, some have had long shadows stretching over their homes and their futures as there walks a reaper who is abroad threatening disease, cold and hunger. We all seem to have a growing sense that soon we may all be walking with Our Lord on the Via Dolorossa!

Each of us is confronted in the next two weeks with a figure that walks ahead of all our troubles, all our woes and all our deaths but He looks back to us, looks back into us, into the eyes of each soul and He says these words into the depths of our being: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me”.

Throughout this week of Passiontide, we find that the opposition to Jesus grows more intense and more hostile. As Our Lord increasingly makes clear his true identity so the hostility increases as we find in the readings for these weekdays from the Gospel of John [8:12-20, 21-30, 31-42, 51-59; 10:31-42; 11:45-56]. It seems like the more explicit Jesus is about who he is and what his mission is the more the leaders try to seize him, arrest him and even stone him but Jesus is illusive. Indeed, he is also becoming more difficult to find and when they try to lay hands on him or stone him he is able to hide from them or slip through the fingers or escaped from their hands [John 8:59; 10:39 cf also Luke 4:29-32]! This is because, as the Gospel of John makes clear, Our Lord’s time had not yet come [John 2:4; 7:6; 12:23-34] and that no one takes his life but he lays it down freely [John 10:18] which will be in the Garden of Gethsemene after the Last Supper. It is for this reason that the high priests and leaders not only could not find him easily but they could not lay hands on him easily, either! Hence, these leaders are desperate to try and find someone on the inside who would be willing to betray Our Lord, Judas!

There is a number of spiritual principles that we could and should draw from the cat and mouse game of hide and seek that we see played out in this week of Passiontide. Firstly, the more we go against Our Lord and his Mission the more he will become illusive to us. Secondly, only those who seek him, those looking for healing from him, those willing to repent of their sins and those willing to follow him will find him. Thirdly, Our Lord’s use of his time is providential as he obeys his heavenly Father not just in what he does but also when he does it, that is why he lays down his life when it is the right time to do so - “my hour has not yet come” [John 2:4]; “my hour has come” [John 12:23-34]! Our Lord is also the Lord of Time and that includes our use of time. Too many of us are wasting valuable time, other people’s time and God’s time - especially in Lent - by being busy with non-essentials, needless shopping, aimless fraternising and gossiping, and low culture soaps and internet hopping!

Life is passing us by because time is passing us by as we have not used out time for the Lord and insteead neglected to fast, to go to the stations of the Cross, to go to weekday early morning Mass, to go to Confession. Often we have not been faithful pilgrim Catholics but rather just been modernist, consumerist, supermarket and tourist Catholics. Time has not been a grace for us, it is rather been just a waste. We are living life increasingly without Faith, Hope or Charity and ending up being Drifters in Time rather than Sanctifiers of Time!

As this week turns from being Passiontide to a week that we call Holy Week, we know that it demands of us to get serious and to get focused otherwise another Lent will have been wasted which may turn out to be our last opportunity to do a proper Lent. A real lived out Lent aids us in entering into the Depths of Holy Week and receive from this holiest of weeks a renewed life through the grace of Easter! It is Our Lord who in this Coming Holy Week will walk into the depths of pain, suffering and death that afflicts all humanity which are a consequence of both evil forces and sin, but also of:

• unrepented sins,

• of hearts hardened in wickedness that wish ill to their fellow human beings,

• of acts that reject, despise and curse God,

• and of acts of those who consciously oppose the One who comes to save them by suffering for them, dying for them and rising from the grave for them.

We believe in the God who comes to all of us to save us from our sins, sins that destroy our souls, our lives, our children and our world.

Yet here is the God unlooked for, the God unknown to all, the God unforseen, the God who is the Crucified God; that from the cross says to every one of us on this mortal coil, “ Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!” So that no one need ever again to suffer alone nor die alone but can know amidst their suffering, dying and death that there is a hope that goes against all those false hopes offered by the world, the flesh and the devil. These false hopes, on which we may have built our lives, will evaporate before the awesome moment of our deaths where our souls will step through the veil, a veil that from this side of the grave hides another world, for it is at this final junction of our lives that we step from time into eternity.

Watch the below video from Queen of Peace media: