The second element I would like to underline is that – unwillingly – we are placed in a position of power. I hope it is “unwillingly” because anyone who looks for power should not be admitted to the priesthood.
You know the popular saying: “power corrupts” and “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The expression belongs to Lord Acton, an English historian who wrote it down in a letter to an Anglican bishop about 150 years’ ago!
In the Catholic Church, we choose to talk about the clergy being servant leaders because our power is to serve and to give up our lives for the ransom of many (Mark 10:45) as Jesus did.
But it could well happen that a sickness attached to power in the world affect us too. One is to lose any sense of empathy with the people we serve. We could be tempted to place ourselves at the centre and raise all sorts of needs that most of the people we are called to serve cannot even dream about!
I remember something I witness about thirty-five years' ago, in another continent. I was visiting a priest when a non-Catholic woman went to the local Parish Caritas looking for food. She was indeed poor. There was nothing wrong with that. All over the world Caritas welcomes Catholics and non-Catholics. Just that the parish priest discovered that the woman would take the food and then give it to her pastor. She would do that not because the pastor was hungry but because he demanded she would contribute to his welfare as a member of that church.
Our mission and our power are linked. Our position puts us at risk of not giving the blind new sight but making blind those who see, to oppress the free or to afflict the comforted. We saw an example on the fourth Sunday of Lent when the Jews threatened to expulse from the synagogue anyone who would say Jesus was the Messiah. They used fear to oppress the people and make them blind.
I am much more than you in a position of power and therefore these words I share with you are part of my own reflection.
I have lived in different countries and continents, and I have seen leaders making the people blind, developing projects of destruction, suffering and death, putting themselves at the centre and not caring about anyone else but themselves.
I need to make sure you and me do not do the same.
In fact, today’s second question – as you renew your promises – will ask you if you are ready to conform more with Jesus by denying yourselves… This means using your power in the right way and being good news to those wounded by the road.
May the final words of today’s Gospel passage lead our daily, monthly or annual examination of our lives. It says:
Then Jesus began to speak to them, ‘This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen.’
Is this text being fulfilled in me as it was in Jesus? That’s the question for our personal reflection.
I pray that this Lenten Season that comes to an end may have been for us a time of death and resurrection, of new life for us and for the people we serve.
May the One who began his good work in you and me, bring it to fulfilment.
