Gospel Reflection
Third Sunday of Lent
23 March 2025, Church Year C
The Ernstfall
Fr. Joseph M. Rampino


Reprinted by permission of "The Arlington Catholic Herald"

Home Page
To Sunday Gospel Reflections Index

“If you do not repent, you will all perish.”  This weekend’s Gospel provides us with stark words that can serve as a powerful test of our spiritual health.  They are words we might not associate with our merciful Jesus, whose cross is the source of infinite forgiveness.  We could easily imagine that if a reporter went out onto the streets of an American city and asked the passersby whose words these are, very few would answer correctly.  Yet, they are His and we must let them hit us with their full force if we want to derive from them any benefit.

Some might respond to these words of Jesus with a defensive sort of anger, seeing this and any threat of condemnation as an act of coercion, as words of implied hated for particular ways of living, or as an unjust limitation of freedom and autonomy.  Some, dismayed by the difficulty of successfully turning away from and avoiding sin, might see in these words reason for despair.  Neither response reckons rightly with the goodness of the speaker, who is Jesus Christ, and neither is capable of meeting the words as they are meant.

To response to the former, Christ is the good author of human nature, and loves each individual person more than they love themselves.  If he has taught something though his church, it is impossible for that teaching to constitute either coercion, hatred or a limitation.  If Christ knows each person perfectly and loves them totally, then his commands must correspond to their perfect good and authentic freedom, even if difficult to accept personally or to affirm socially.

To respond to the second, the Christ who warns is also the one who knows our weakness as fallen creatures, and who will never fail to pour out the grace of forgiveness and of help too those who honestly strive for him.  He is not waiting to catch anyone on a technicality  but desires our salvation.  So, what then are we to make of Jesus’ stark words?

The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar gives us a term to describe what lies at their heart.  Balthasar wrote that the Christian life is marked by a moment he called the Ernstfall, German for “emergency.”  Every soul, when confronted with the Lord’s call to enter into friendship must make a defining choice for or against him.  The stakes are as high as possible, since the results are either choice for Christ and eternal joy beyond what is imaginable or choice against him and eternal loss.  There is no middle road for any person, no way in which we can choose Christ in some small ways, the world in others, sin in others.  There can be no casual Christianity.  The arrival of Christ means the definitive relativization of any merely prosaic life in the world.  As St. Paul says, we must “deal with the world as though (we) had no dealings with it, for the form of this world is passing away.”  This crisis of decision, to repent or perish, is the Ernstfall.

Chris’s announcing this truth to us is, in the end a great act of love.  He desires the salvation of every person, that each should share with him his own life and divine nature.  The stakes he reveals may be frightening, but they would not disappear if he did not reveal them.  This Lent, the church calls us to make our choice again: for Christ or for not-Christ.  We can reach for the extended hand of our creator and savior with confidence, knowing that if we choose for him, he will not fail to lift us up.


Home Page

Top
To Sunday Gospel Reflections Index