Call to Holiness Through Suffering – the Witness of Cyril of Jerusalem
Homily from March 18, 2026.
Praise be Jesus Christ. Now and forever. Carissima famiglia, my dearest family.
What a beautiful image we have from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. This is actually the book of the second prophet named Isaiah. There are two Isaiahs. The first Isaiah writes the first 40 chapters, and he is a prophet during the time of the exile in Babylon of the people of Israel. The second Isaiah, Deutero-Isaiah, is another prophet who either took the name or was given the name of Isaiah. He is speaking to the people who have arrived back since Cyrus allowed the Jewish tribes of Judah and Benjamin and Levi to return.
And so their exile is done, but the place, Jerusalem, is a mess. In today’s reading, the Lord speaks of bounty and graciousness that are going to pour over them.
“I kept you,” he says. “You are a covenant to all the people. Come out. Show yourselves. You will go and say to all the people that you find there who have been hiding and are broken, and you shall have all kinds of blessings on this journey. And the mountain that you made back home and the road that you will make going back to the rebuilding of this temple and the re-establishing of yourself will be a highway. So sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth.”
And the response of the people who have returned from their exile?
“The Lord has forsaken me. The Lord has forgotten me.”
Here indeed is the mystery. A mystery we know well. We ask for one thing of the Lord when we find ourselves in trials and are at wits end. And trials ours because such is the human condition. Much of the difficulties in our life, though by no means all, come from our having set ourselves up for difficulties. I mean, if you’re “foolish” enough to have children, you’re going to have challenges. So, you set yourself up for it. Perhaps that’s not quite right …, but pains come, and you pray for that pain to be lifted. And then when you find yourself back in a new way of living, your life is upside down and all over the place in a new way. And once again, we complain, “Why am I here?” Is it the case that our life is one of a lot of complaining to the Lord?
St. Cyril of Jerusalem – whose feast it is today – was a remarkable intellectual and a very holy disciple of the Lord Jesus, who became a priest and exercises his ministry in the time that the persecution of Christians had ended. They had come home from their “exile”. And with the death of St. Maximus, he was named to the great See of Jerusalem as Bishop. The “great See” of the Lord.
And no longer persecuted by the political powers, the Christians took to persecuting each other. He was bishop there for almost thirty years. He was exiled four times, including once for fourteen years, because the people didn’t like who he was. They said, “You’re taking sides” because the Church was all divided, just like the church today,
“You’re on that side. You’re not on our side. …. You’re on their, their side, not on our side.”
And everyone was be angry at him. And he tried to keep a calm middle place in all of this to preserve unity, and his reward for this was that he was accused of stealing church funds.
He was also accused of theological heresies, and he was exiled. That’s the situation that often happens because human beings, including in the church, just love drama. We love fighting with each other and being annoyed with each other.
Oh, you say, we don’t love it. Well, if we didn’t love it, why would we do it? And we do it, so we must like it. What did Cyril do in the face of these trials? Cyril wrote the Church’s first systematic Catechism, first Instruction, first organized instruction for those who are baptized into life.
How wonderful. Instead of becoming bitter and annoyed, which was his right. Instead of coming down with a hammer, he instead used the occasion of this struggle to produce teaching, writing with a deeper kind of wisdom.
His theology and his writings are not dry, but instead filled with a gentle and strong passion. And where did that come from? From being one who suffered. Suffered through the situation [like Isaiah] when the Lord has brought a people back, and there is new division. Like there will be when we get brought back upstairs [from the basement of St. Paul’s Co-Cathedral], when our building will be done. We are quite liable to arguing again and being annoyed with each other.
But in the midst of all of that struggle, Cyril knew, as Saint Peter tells us, that we should rejoice, that we are able to share in the sufferings of Jesus. You see, because the temple that has been built is not the temple that Herod built [upon the Babylonian exiles’ Temple]. That Temple is gone, and with that has ended the story of the First Covenant. It is no more.
Instead, it is fulfilled. The Old Covenant and its Temple worship is no more because it is fulfilled in Jesus, who teaches us in today’s gospel the absolute truth. John 5:16
Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” 18 For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
The Jews are angry because He says that He is God. How many people have tried to this explain away, including our poor Muslim confreres in this world, who say that Jesus never claimed he was Lord?
But we have just heard right now Him telling with absolute clarity that He is the Lord. He and the Father are absolutely one, that the praise to the Father is the praise to the Son, and the praise to the Son. So, [such a claim gave] the Jews had every right to stone Him. but that was not the will of the Father, because Jesus was not just going to die for the Jews, he was to die for all people, so that you and I, in dying to ourselves, might find the wisdom that comes from living through suffering and division, which is seemingly irrational, seemingly undeserved, but for those who endure it, uniting it with Christ in His way of saving the world.
Let us be holy. Let us be saints.