Saturday April 12, 2025

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“From that day on they planned to kill him. So Jesus no longer walked about in public among the Jews.” (John 11:53-54)

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Good News Reflection for:

Saturday of the 5th Week of Lent
April 12, 2025

Today’s Readings:

Ezekiel 37:21-28
Jeremiah 31:10-13
John 11:45-56
bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/041225.cfm
USCCB Podcast of the Readings:
bible.usccb.org/podcasts/audio/daily-mass-reading-podcast-april-12-2025

Into the Depths: the Dark Night of the Soul

Jesus experienced a dark night of the soul in the Garden of Gethsemane. (I learned this from a meditation by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, Preacher to the Papal Household, which he gave to Pope Saint John Paul II in 2002.)

Dark nights often begin with rejection. Perhaps the dark night of Jesus’ soul began, as we see in the Gospel reading (John 11:45-56), when plans to kill him prevented him from walking around in public. How difficult and sad that must have been for him!

Although it happened several days before Good Friday, his hands were already being tied and his feet were being shackled, in a sense, because he was no longer free to minister to everyone or to reach out to and offer healing and salvation to those who needed it.

Have you ever been constrained from doing good for others? How do you feel about it? Does your soul cry out from a deep love for those you cannot reach?

Jesus hunkered down in Ephraim with his disciples while the chief priests and Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and asked, “What are we going to do to stop Jesus?”

Has anyone tried to stop you from fulfilling your calling, your God-given dream, your ministry?

We are reaching Palm Sunday. The whole of Holy Week is wrapped inside this special feast day, which is why it’s also called Passion Sunday. This is a week like no other week, and now is the time to ready ourselves to enter into it in such a way that we are transformed by it.

To live this week like it’s any other week is to waste a very precious gift. By next Saturday, we should be different than we are today: Our lives, or our relationship with Jesus, or the wounds in our hearts should somehow be changed between now and then.

The key to receiving this change is to unite your rejections and your sufferings to the Passion of Christ. Think of how your life imitates Christ’s Passion. For what reasons have you been mocked? Scourged? Crucified? Thank Jesus for being with you through it all. Make it redemptive (give it a purpose) by asking the Father to make good come from it. Pray that your sufferings will purify you. And ask God to bless those who persecute you. May the redemption of Christ reach their hearts and souls!

Now, allow yourself to experience Christ’s passionate love for you more deeply than ever before. Good News Ministries has an online, interactive retreat for this. It’s entitled “Christ’s Passion for you” and it uses my photographs from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. See it @ wordbytes.org/lent/passion-retreat.

© 2025 by Terry A. Modica

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