The Fifth Sunday of Lent

Drunk dating is what happens when you mix vodka, loneliness, and hormones creating an ungodly concoction of adulterous affairs, irascible interactions, and the occasional grand theft auto. But does it really count if you only make it down the block before falling out laughing on the neighbor’s grass?

This style of dating can, if done serially, lead to long lasting tumultuous relationships where issues between partners ignite from Jager bombs and are fanned by vodka tonics. Then, as quickly as they emerged, are suppressed under the blanket of hangover shame, coffee grumps, and awkward, teeth-grinding, so… Aaannnywayyy… How’s about a screwdriver luv?

These relationships can last years or decades, depending on the stubbornness of personalities that are melting into each like a phoenix with smoker’s cough and gout (yet it won’t stop eating cheese!). Alcohol has a tendency of dampening any ambition and certainly can be used to cloak unease with feigned contentment, however—insidiously—alcohol can also supplant these coerced feelings of contentment with a general malaise and unworthiness of anything better.

What was once drinking to accept the reality of our situations, as opposed to fixing them, eventually becomes drinking to perpetuate our circumstances because day by day we feel more and more stuck, as if the tar in our lungs permeates our being and glues us into our choices and consequences like a hellish Groundhog’s Day of which there is no escape. The fights get worse, the suppressed infect the deepest chasms of our being, and we no longer have the motivation to even steal a car for a joy ride.

We’re stuck.

We’re drunk.

Therefore, we’re used to it.

Now, as bad enough as that is there is, on the other side, a similarly awful circumstance that we find ourselves in after crawling out of the filth of these deep, drunk dating caverns or: Dating Drunk.    

Where when drunk dating involves waking up in a stranger’s bed wondering just how one got there dating drunk involves waking up in a stranger’s bed wondering just why…

Why do we keep making these same mistakes? We’re sober after all! We need not continue perpetuating our circumstances that led to us putting the bottle down in the first place.

Yet here we are.

Still waking up with the same problems, in fact, a hangover at least clouded us to our real problems, but now we can’t flipping escape them. We go to sleep and there they are we wake up in the morning and there they are. At least when we had a partner to face the hangover with, we could shift our judgmental eye onto them instead of allowing our shame to overshadow us. Though, it did, regardless of who caught our blame that day.

The problem arises when we try picking up the pieces of our lives that we were missing during the days when we lived to drink and drunk to live, and that problem is figuring out just what pieces are not so tainted that we need to fuss over them at all.

I mean, did anything good come out of those years at all? And you wonder, truly, if you aren’t just the most miserable, wretched thing for behaving the way that you did for so long. How many people you hurt and, of course, how many times you hurt yourself through what can only be described as willful self-abandonment, not to mention the physical toll of drinking.

You drank for so long trying to keep your circumstances the way they were, to both accept and to justify why you felt so miserable. Why you were miserable. And now, that same mental habit has followed you into the light of sobriety.

Again, at least the hangovers were like self-flagellating and a daily act of penance. Without that, what do we have?

In the Fifth Sunday of Lent’s Gospel reading, we find Jesus and His disciples having just come into Jerusalem, triumphantly. Jesus has probably been in Jerusalem a day or two by the point of the reading when some learned Greeks come inquiring of Jesus, asking to see Him. He responds in a telling way to their want to see Him, which was to say that His hour had come. It is almost as if these Greek inquiries, the Gentiles, asking to see Jesus prompts Him to exclaim that the time has come to unite the Gentiles and the Jews into Christ Himself through the cross.

Jesus’ glorification, He explains, can only happen through His death and His ascension. His blood is the seed that will germinate the land and will symbolically cover the peoples of the world—Creation itself—as an atoning sacrifice. This and His ascension will deliver the world the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, which will energize the believer and facilitate the process of salvation wherein we become like Christ.

And how do we become like Christ?

Jesus says, “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor” (John 12:26).

It is important to recognize the significance of this call, that God Himself, the Maker of Creation, will give us honor as we abide by His Word. We are seeing the process of theosis illustrated by Jesus, as He shows that to be His servant is, in a way, to actually becomes like Him. We become (little s) sons of God by conforming our lives to God’s Word, and by conforming to His Word we are, in a sense, participating in the life of Christ, becoming little Christs (what the word Christian means). Thereby, we participate in the heavenly mysteries as honored by God.

We become sons of God by following the Son and doing the will of the Father, glorifying His Name. 

The Father Himself emphasizes Jesus’ point by a thunderous voice from heaven, “I have both glorified it and will glorified it again.”

We see this glorification in Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension; again, this ascension leading to the descent of the Holy Spirit, uniting all of Creation to God through this principle of germination. This is the seed, sprouting in all the world as was prophesied by the Prophet Jeremiah in this Sunday’s reading:

“The days are surely 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 that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

No longer will the Gentiles seek the Lord as the Greeks did in Jerusalem, inquiring of the disciples to see Him. Through the glorification of the Father by the descent of the Holy Spirit and the spread of the Gospel now we may know the Lord our God, by keeping His commandments, learning His statutes, and conforming to His Word, written.

God is the God of gods, the Lord of hosts, and the King of kings; all knees shall bow to His Name and all men shall know Him for He has written His law on our hearts. Through the cross, He has established us, Gentiles and Jews alike, as His people (Galatians 3:28).

The covenant He has made with His people was made at the mystical supper before His execution on the cross. This covenant where He offers His Body and Blood, uniting us to Him, energizing the work of God in us via the Holy Spirit. This, too, glorifies the Father and by following Christ we are glorifying the Father and becoming children of God, little by little, glory to glory.

So, in all things we are taught by Jesus to glorify God. We glorify God by becoming like His Son,

“So also Christ did not glorify himself in becoming a high priest but was appointed by the one who said to him,

‘You are my Son;

    today I have begotten you’;

as he says also in another place,

‘You are a priest forever,

    according to the order of Melchizedek.’

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up 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 reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered, and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, having been designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek” (Hebrews 5:5-10).

As the High Priest, it is Jesus Who offers to God Himself as a sacrifice and is the sacrifice Himself. By partaking in this unbloody sacrifice we are, not memorializing His actions like pouring out a libation in remembrance of our friends, gone too soon, and maybe gone as they lived…

No, this is a memorial wherein we participate in His sacrifice, we enter into the mysteries of God, becoming like Him, conformed in the image of the High Priest Who builds us up spiritually and materially through the sacrament of the Eucharist. This is the new covenant with the house of Israel, no longer dwelling beyond a barrier, but within us all; the very Body and the very Blood.

God is our God.

The people of Israel dealt with God like drunks, dating in the wilderness. Caught off guard by the idols and sacrifices of the land of Canaan, pushed and pulled, inflamed by every passing opportunity to give themselves over to adulterous affairs and exploding with resentment toward their loving husband: God.

They might be off the hook on any alleged GTA, though.

The Ten Commandments begin with God exclaiming that He is Israel’s God, and they shall have no other gods besides Him. Our God is a jealous God, which means that He wants us for Himself, He wants to love us fully and that requires us to love Him fully. To love Him only a little is simply loving our lives, trying to keep them.

Too afraid to let them go. Maybe too stubborn to.

God held the Israelites’ hands in that first year of sobriety (give or take 2200 years), because He knew—as a loving Father—how difficult this road to recovery was going to be for this small, rag-tag tribe of Hebrews. He knew—as a loving God—how difficult a proposition it is it ask a people to become perfect. He knew—as a loving husband—how difficult it was for a group to understand (and commit to) monogamy in a polytheistic world.

Yet, He took Abraham out of the land of the Chaldeans, anyway. Out of His love for humanity.

And we see exactly why He did so in the words of the Word, “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.” God brought His people out of the land of the Chaldeans, out of the land of Egypt, and drives out the ruler of this world because He wants us to become His children; He wants to love us, eternally, in this life, in the next, and the world to come. To fulfill that love is to love Him, too.

The Israelites, seen in Jesus’ time, make a lot of mistakes one makes dating drunk…

They say they love God, they say they follow the commandments, yet Jesus see right through them, 

“This people honors me with their lips,

    but their hearts are far from me;

in vain do they worship me,

    teaching human precepts as doctrines” (Matthew 15:8).

We see the Israelites making the same mistakes they did in the wilderness at the time of Jesus, committing adulterous affairs with the idols of their own minds and self-righteous piety; we see them praying like the Pharisees; greedy and selfish; blind leading the blind.

Have they learned nothing from getting sober?

Or is that perfection is a lot further away than we think when we are in the depths of hell?

It seems that eternal life is right around the corner from a three-day chip, maybe even a four-year chip. It is always just over the horizon. However, we need not despair at the circumstances we find ourselves lest we grumble like the Israelites in the desert, awaiting God’s Word and becoming bored by the lack of stimuli, taking, instead of cultivating patience to crafting idols in the wilderness claiming that this, in fact, is God.

In recovery, it is easy for us to assume that after a couple years we are safe from temptations, especially if we are not around alcohol, however I have found that without alcohol all those tendencies in us to become enraged at the slightest provocation, to cheat on our spouse (or God), and even to steal a car are only more present the less our state is fixed in an alcohol-filled rut.

Jesus instructs us, if we are to be His followers, that to conform ourselves to Him; to serve Him and to glorify God that requires us to lose our lives, to even hate our lives in this world. He is not instructing us to practice self-loathing, otherwise He might as well hand us a drink and help us induce a hangover. What Jesus is asking us to consider is that these temptations that run amok are as internal as they are external, and to hate them is to no longer feed them.

Truly, to abstain from their whispers and influence over our lives.

What dating drunk does, in an earth-shattering and hopelessly disenchanting way, is help us to see ourselves without the booze. It makes us confront how we are conforming our image to the world. Where the booze was covering up these qualities of character and patterns of behavior, the light of God shines upon all that the darkness covered and confounds that which is seen.

The Greeks coming, wishing to see Jesus are answered by our Lord almost as if to say, “Are you sure?”

Because those that seek to find God will, for those who knock shall have the door opened to them.

Those who seek shall find.  

Jesus here explains that to follow Him one must be willing to give up everything. For that is the Way. Ultimately, we are given a choice between conforming our image to the world or to Christ; to become children of the world—that is, children of the ruler of this world—or children of God.

Dating drunk is making mistakes, felt entirely more so because of the lack of alcohol in our systems. Dating drunk, however, opens up the opportunity to actually make changes in our lives that will help us redirect our course. Dating drunk reveals to us who we are: adulterers, idolaters, fornicators; thieves, covetous, drunkards (spiritually-speaking), revilers, and extortioners (1 Corinthians 6:9).

We are passionate beings, glued to perpetuating our mistakes by adhering to our desires and inflammatory outbursts of wrath, sexual immorality, and car theft… These revelations are not meant for us to fall into despair, but to call us to repentance and to glorify the Lord by following His Word rather than our will.

Dating drunk means, we can no longer deceive ourselves as to our behavior.

Like, when two people go sober together and three months in realize that it was actually them that were fighting, not the booze. And then they have to see how stubborn they really are by continuing not to deal with their problems until… Well, do they love their life or hate it? Do they try to cling to what does not work or do they, humbly, try to fix the situation?

Either way, they can no longer pretend that everything is fine by blaming the spirits.

And neither can we if we do not serve God. If we continue conforming our image to the world then we will receive what the world has to offer, which is void. If we follow the Word and serve God, life may not become easy, but it will become full. Full of His light, full of His love, and filled with His glory.

Si comprehendis, non est Deus