Lifted Up On the Cross, Jesus You Liberate Me
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We begin Week 5 of our Sunday Lenten Challenge with this opening prayer:
Trust And Believe
Lord,
I believe you want to give me the grace to go deeper in prayer this Lent. Help me to be present to you so that I’ll intimately pray these next 15 minutes with my heart fully open and willing to receive that grace. Please help me open my heart and pray with more intensity. I want to be able to visualize myself with you so I can feel your presence more intimately in my life this Lent. Lord, give me the grace I need as I strive to complete these 6 days of Sunday Lenten meditations. I am choosing to take up my cross and humbly follow you all the way to Calvary and I want to do it with my whole heart.
AMEN.
Liberation Through Christ
We’ve all experienced something in life that has chained us in sinful patterns. Today we will contemplate how we can surrender these sinful habits to the Lord and be liberated through Christ.
Prayer to the Holy Spirit
Holy Spirit,
I believe you are truly here and present to me right now. I desire to be present to you. I need to be liberated, and I know that if I can keep my eyes on the Cross, Jesus will liberate me from my sinful habits.
I am here, Lord, because you liberate me from sin by drawing me to yourself, first by making me curious, and now by the growing love you have placed in my heart for you.
Come, Holy Spirit, so that I can worship you with a pure heart and without distraction. Help me to separate myself from all worldly attachments and spend these 15 minutes with my heart and mind completely fixated on you. Rescue me from all my sinful inclinations. You know all my weaknesses and that I can’t elevate my heart or my mind without your help.
Please give me the grace right now to pray my mental prayer well and to love you in a way that is pleasing to you. I want to grow to love you more perfectly. Thank you, Lord, for every consolation, desolation, time of silence, difficult trial, and temptation of the evil one. I understand that everything that happens in my life is by your holy will, whether it be your divine providence or your permissive will due to my sin and negligence.
Please humble me as I walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem. Help me carry my cross well and do so with great love in my heart for you.
AMEN.
Say Nothing Just Take Him In
Spend 1-3 minutes in silence gazing at the Lord with love and gratitude, in a prayer of silent contemplation
Make a Movie in Your Mind
Now we will contemplate the first reading.
You are far from home, in a city built to overwhelm anyone who enters it. The famous double walls of Babylon rise so thick that chariots race along their top; the Ishtar Gate ahead of you gleams with glazed blue brick, dragons and bulls molded in relief along its face, a monument to gods that are not your God. The air carries the smell of the Euphrates, of foreign spices in the market stalls, of incense burned for idols you don’t recognize.
You are a captive here, decades now since the Temple burned, and some nights the ache of it is almost unbearable—the sound of your own language spoken only in whispers, the songs of Zion you no longer sing aloud. And yet tonight, in a small gathering of exiles who still remember, the prophet Jeremiah begins to speak—not a word of further judgment, as you might expect, but something entirely different: a promise of a New Covenant, one no longer carved into stone tablets that could be broken, but written directly onto the human heart itself…
I will Write My Law in their Hearts
Jeremiah 31:31-34
The days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers the day I took them by the hand to lead them forth from the land of Egypt; for they broke my covenant and I had to show myself their master, says the LORD.
But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD. I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
No longer will they have need to teach their friends and kinsmen how to know the LORD. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.
The people of Judah learned obedience from what they suffered. For they would not listen to the Prophet Jeremiah in their own land, but after their exile to Babylon, when they longed for their temple and their familiar ways, and the closeness of God, they once again began to open their hearts. It was in this place that he delivers this message of hope, one that Jesus later fulfills.
Be Completely Real
Ask yourself, is the Lord’s law on your heart? Have you made a covenant with God only to have broken it afterward?
If this is you, make a new covenant with the Lord right now. Use the words of Jeremiah to formulate your own prayer. Take a minute or two to speak to the Lord from your heart.
Now we will contemplate the Lord by listening to him speak to us in the Gospels.
Visualize Christ
Jerusalem is packed for Passover, pilgrims from every corner of the empire crowding its narrow streets — and among them, remarkably, a small group of Greeks, God-fearing Gentiles who have come to worship at the feast.
You watch them approach Philip, hesitant, respectful: “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” Philip hurries to find Andrew, and together they go to tell the Lord. You can feel the air shift the moment Jesus hears the request—something in his face changes, as though a long-approaching hour has finally arrived. “The hour has come,” he says, “for the Son of Man to be glorified.” But there’s no triumph in his voice, not yet. You watch him speak of a grain of wheat that must fall into the ground and die before it can bear fruit, and then, quieter, almost to himself: “I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?” You’ve followed him through miracles and crowds and glory — but this is the first time you’ve seen him afraid…
The Hour Has Come
John 12:20-33
Now there were some Greeks among those who had come up to worship at the feast. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.“
Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be. The Father will honor whoever serves me.”
I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”
The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder; but others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered and said, “This voice did not come for my sake but for yours. Now is the time of judgment on this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.“
He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.
The letter to the Hebrews later describes this very anguish: “In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (Hebrews 5:7). This is no distant, untouched God speaking calmly of his own death. This is the Son, genuinely troubled, genuinely pleading — and genuinely obedient anyway.
Let us meditate on the phrase, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.”
Reflect for a moment on your first profound encounter with Jesus. Let your mind revisit that memory. Can you recall how in your curiosity you wanted to ‘see Jesus’ and so you prayed to him?
How did he come to you? At that time where was your heart?
Seeing him and knowing him are not the same as loving him and following him.
Where are you now? Do you still only want to ‘see’ or do you also want to follow and obey the Holy Spirit and be conformed by Christ?
Now listen to the second part of Jesus’ teaching, “And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.”
How has Jesus drawn you to himself? Has he changed how you live? What you believe? How you act? How has Jesus done this? Whatever Jesus has drawn you toward— whatever gift of grace has taken root in you —remember that it was never given just for you alone.
Lord, I understand that the gifts of the Spirit are given for the uplifting of the Church, and so I ask you to help me obey the Church and grow in the virtues of obedience, humility, and charity so that I can use the gifts you have given me to glorify you and build up your Church. Protect me from being deceived by the evil one and help me to glorify you in a way that pleases you. AMEN.
Are You Listening?
Hebrews tells us that Jesus, “son though he was, learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Hebrews 5:8-9). His obedience wasn’t easy or automatic — it was learned, the same way yours is, through real suffering, real fear, real “Father, save me from this hour” moments of your own.
He was heard because of his reverence. Do you have that same reverence for God — that same willingness to bring him your honest fear, your honest reluctance, and still say, in the end, “not my will, but yours”?
Let us pray for the ability to have more reverence toward God in our lives:
Lord, please give me the Holy Spirit’s gift of having a healthy fear of the Lord, so that by being afraid of offending you I might better imitate you in thought, word, and deed. Let me be Christlike in how I treat others. Please, Lord, make me like you. AMEN.
Pray the next Lenten Meditation
The Palm Sunday of Lent, Year B
You Humbled Yourself to be Crucified Because You Love Me
Palm Sunday, Year B. Jesus humbles Himself to enter Jerusalem, and soon after, humbles Himself even to death, for love of us.