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