Sermons of Fr Paul Robinson SSPX

During the second half of Lent, the Church does something remarkable in the traditional liturgy: she has us read almost exclusively from the Gospel of St. John. From day 21 until the last day of Lent, there are only two Gospels that are not from St. John, outside the readings of the Passion. During that time, we read about 43% of the Gospel of St. John.
It is clear that the Church wants us to focus on this Gospel in order to learn about the Passion.
We know that this Gospel is unique: it was written long after the other three Gospels; it contains more words of Our Lord than any of the other Gospels; it seeks to complete what is missing in the other Gospels; it focuses especially on Our Lord’s claim to be God and His conflicts with the leaders of the Jewish religion.
I thought it might be helpful for us, on this Passion Sunday, to consider three things regarding all of these passages of St. John that the Church gives us in the second half of Lent:What is Our Lord doing and what are His claims about what He is doing?
What is the reaction of those who witness His actions and hear His claims?
What does this mean for us today?

When we read the epistles of St. Paul, we are mainly reading letters written by an Apostle to former pagans. These were people who had grown up in the world of the Roman Empire. It was a world of great military power and of amazing engineering feats, but also one of great decadence.
These people were not just used to leading immoral lives; leading such lives was a way of life. In other words, it was considered normal behavior to be immoral. By this, I mean getting drunk, committing fornication, seeking after riches, and so on.
Then, this Jewish man named Paul came into their lives, explaining to them that God Himself came down upon this earth and that He taught what we are made for, He redeemed us from our sins, and He showed us how we must live our lives in order to get to Heaven.
Many of these pagans converted and, when they did, they completely changed their lives. They stopped living as pagans in the Roman Empire and started living as Catholics.
At the same time, they still had to struggle greatly against their old habits, particularly the habit of impurity. It is striking that, in today’s epistle and in last Sunday’s epistle, the Church wants us to read St. Paul exhorting these former pagans to fight against impurity.
We are Catholics living 2,000 years later, we are in the middle of the penitential season of Lent, and the Church wants us to hear these words of the Apostle Paul to help us make that same fight against sins of the flesh that the first Catholics were doing.
Today, I would like us to hear some words of these two epistles about impurity, to understand what they mean, and also to understand why it is so important to fight impurity.

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There are two times during Lent when the Church tries to give us a boost and encourage us to persevere in our Lenten practices. One time, of course, is Laetare Sunday, which occurs just after the halfway point of Lent. The other time is today, when we are a quarter of the way through Lent.
The fact that the Church tries to encourage us today indicates to us that we should already be feeling a bit worn out by our Lenten resolutions. We should be needing a second wind.
If we have not yet made any resolutions for Lent, we must be sure to do so today. If we are finding our resolutions easy, perhaps we should add something to them that is more difficult.
For those of us who are worn out, the Church gives us encouragement in the same way that Our Lord chose to encourage the Apostles right before His crucifixion. He did it by becoming transfigured before them.
The Church shows us that she really wants to reflect carefully on this episode in Our Lord’s life by giving us the same Gospel two days in a row, for Ember Saturday and today. She only does this one other time, Ember Saturday in Advent and the Fourth Sunday of Advent.
This transfiguration is encouraging for us because it shows the glory that will come at the end of our struggles. If we persevere in the Catholic life, if we continue carrying our Cross and being faithful, one day we will enter heavenly glory.
Our garments will be as white as snow because of the radiance of our body. Our body will shine brighter than the sun.
Just as when there is a contest, the contestants are shown the prize that will be awarded to the winner before they start the contest. Seeing the prize encourages those who are competing. When they are in the midst of the competition, they think about what they will earn if they win and they continue in their efforts.
So, too, for us, a quarter of the way through Lent and a certain percentage of the way through our life. We might be weary of our duty of state and the daily grind. We might be weary fighting against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Then, we remind ourselves: if I persevere, I will win an eternal crown. I will be happy forever. I will receive a glorified body that will never suffer.
This vision of Our Lord’s glory had a huge impact on St. Peter. He mentions it as definitive proof of Our Lord’s divinity in his second epistle, “We were not following fictitious tales when we made known to you the power and coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his grandeur. For he received from God the Father honor and glory, when from out the majestic glory a voice came down to him. And this voice we ourselves heard borne from heaven when we were with him on the holy mount” (2 Pet. 1:16-18)
This vision of Our Lord’s glory really happened. And it is a real proof of the glory we will have.

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In today’s Gospel, we see that Our Lord allows Himself to be tempted. He does this for many reasons, but one of the reasons is this: to show us that everyone is tempted in this world, no matter how holy they are.
This is comforting for us, because we all experience temptation and we are sometimes tempted to confuse temptation with sin. Our Lord is perfectly sinless and He was tempted. Thus, it is clear that the mere fact of being tempted is not a sin, and also that we are meant to have temptation in this life.
There is another extreme, however, and this is the extreme of those who are complacent about temptation. They say, “I’m going to be tempted no matter what, so I don’t have to be too careful about temptation”.
There are also those who have a habit of grave sin and yet are constantly putting themselves in situations where they will be tempted to repeat the sin. They say to themselves, “This time I will be stronger” or “The temptation is not really that hard to fight”, even though they usually fall into the sin, whenever they experience the temptation!
The fact is that, while we are meant to experience temptation in this life, we are also meant to avoid bringing temptations upon ourselves. This is especially true when we have habits of mortal sin. If we have a habit of drinking, a habit of gambling, a habit of impurity, and so on, we have a strict duty to avoid situations that will tempt us to fall back into those sins.
In the language of the Church, we have the strict duty to avoid the “near occasion of grave sin”.
In today’s sermon, I want to speak about what we mean by an “occasion of sin” and what we have to do to avoid occasions of sin.

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Superbowl billboard during halftime show: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love”. Comment on Twitter that got four million views: “Imagine getting mad about this and still thinking you’re a good person”.
But the halftime performer Bad Bunny was singing songs that were completely sensual and debased, and calling it love, while the dancers were cavorting in a perverse way on the stage.
What we have here is a debate about the meaning of love. Both sides agree that love is good. But they disagree on what love is. One side believes that love is pleasure; the other side believes that love is sacrifice.Those who believe that love is pleasure think that any enjoyment that any two people have with one another is good, as long as there is mutual consent.
They believe that all forms of pleasure should be tolerated and celebrated, just because of the fact that they provide pleasure.
They believe that all those who criticize the idea that “love is pleasure” are engaging in hate because they say that such people are opposed to love.

St. Augustine famously described these two competing ideas on love in his master work The City of God: “Two loves have built two cities: the love of self even to the despising of God, the city of the earth; the love of God even to the despising of self, the city of God. One glorifies itself in self, and the other in the Lord.”
There is a famous Catholic manual on the spiritual life and it lays down two important principles on this topic of love that help guide us. (Tanquerey, par. 310-311)
The first principle is that the essence of your perfection is charity. What this means is the primary thing that indicates your worth as a human being, your goodness, your value in the eyes of God, is your level of true love, the Catholic idea of love.
We know that Our Lord confirms this in the Gospel when He says that the way we obtain everlasting life is by fulfilling to two great commandments of love of God and of neighbor.
This is what St. Paul confirms in today’s epistle wherein he seeks to prove that charity is the greatest of the virtues. He excludes the false notion of love when he says, “Charity is patient, is kind; charity does not envy, is not pretentious, is not puffed up, is not ambitious, is not self-seeking, is not provoked; thinks no evil, does not rejoice over wickedness, but rejoices with the truth.”
Then he goes on to say that charity is the essence of our perfection by explaining that charity is the virtue that remains when we are in our perfect state, while faith and hope go away. “There remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity”. That is where our perfection lies.
The reason why our perfection lies in charity is that supernatural charity unites us directly to God. There is nothing that unites us more to God that true supernatural charity. But our whole perfection is in uniting ourselves with God. That is what makes us perfect.
The second principle that we must understand about love is that love requires sacrifice. We do not subscribe to this false notion of love wherein love consists in giving yourself pleasure, wherein using another person for your enjoyment is considered our perfection.