It’s the season of Lent and penance and Christ on the cross and then Resurrection. So our acronym this morning for you and for me is “Ouch.” Penance and the cross.... ouch! O U C H, “O” for ordinary, “U” for unfathomable, “C” for the cross and “H” for Hell.

As always we take a look at our six reputable Catholic Bible scholars, and they point out the meaning of the first part. Our Lord says, “Remember when Moses held up the snake in the desert?” That refers to the Old Testament when the Jews were going through the desert and some of them were bitten by, and very sick from bites by, poisonous snakes. And what Moses did was exactly the opposite of what you would think a sensible person would do. Moses made a little statue, a little image of a snake, and he put it on a big stick and he held it up for the Jews who were scared of snakes and some of them were sick and bitten. And Moses held up the stick with the snake. He said, “Take a look at this thing. If you look at this, you will be healed. Don’t be scared. You are going to be healed if you were bitten, and it will protect you.” You know that saying that we have, “Face your fears?” Well, that’s what Moses was doing, three thousand, four thousand years ago. Face your fears. And it worked. They were healed by looking at the very thing they dreaded. And Our Lord goes on to say, “I also will be lifted up.” And the expression “lifted up” to the Jewish ear, the Aramaic language, it was a nice euphemism for crucifixion. “Lifted up!” They knew what it meant. And Jesus says, “I’m going to be lifted up. Take a look.” This ugly, repulsive, disgusting, horrific sight of a man naked, bleeding and suffocating on a cross. Take a look because it’s going to save you. That’s the comparison he’s making. And ouch! That’s what he has to go through to save us.

OK, the first is “ordinary,” the “O” of OUCH. The ordinary. Remember the very first week of Lent, Father, the pastor, Father Brian Joyce.... The homily he gave on the first Sunday of Lent was “Try to do a noble deed every day.” Now, by “noble” he didn’t mean mammoth, magnificent, monumental. It could be something very small that only you know about. But it’s noble because it costs you a little. It costs something. It hurts. It’s a little penance that you are doing, a noble deed. Something ordinary.

Now, when some of us are standing on line at a large grocery chain, when you are waiting, there are a series of magazines on display, of deep philosophical and theological import. “Bruce Biceps breaks up with Glynda Glamorous!” And I saw one recently, the “Weekly World News, the World’s only reliable newspaper,” “Ten New Commandments Found.” Isn’t that great? Ten new commandments have been discovered and there is a picture of Moses who looks like King Lear with a stomach ache. I couldn’t resist. I swooped it up. Wouldn’t it be fun some Sunday after Easter if we all put a lot of commandments we would like to write and picked out the ten best. But... Ten new commandments! Let’s do the ordinary.

The ordinary commandments are challenging enough. Even the simple virtues, for Lent, just to heighten that sense of “It costs me something....It’s a bit of a penance.” Just the ordinary virtues. Oh, I don’t know. Take envy, which is my own besetting vice, envy, jealousy. As a kid, at Mass, coming from a disfunctional family, at Mass I would see these people coming down the communion line, the father looking like a model from GQ Magazine, the mother looking like the fashions from Givenchy from Paris and the little kids right out of a Renaissance painting, all chubbed and cherubic and smug and supercilious and successful, shimmering down the aisle to go to communion, and I hated them! Sat there and hated them. We read in Our Lord’s life, and in the great spiritual writers, “Those are the ones you pray for.” Those are the ones you pray for. You don’t have to like them to pray for them. I would like to pray for those people whom I would cheerfully slaughter! But you say the prayer to Our Lord and to Our Lady. The prayer is sincere. You don’t have to like them. It’s a small thing. It’s a little dinky penance, but St. Theresa wrote “During Lent, most of us cannot do extraordinary penances. We can’t. Travel to countries or people who are starving, stopping the horror of war, stopping abortion, stopping slaughter. We can’t do those extraordinary good works and penance. But just the ordinary ones, but St. Theresa adds, “but with extraordinary care, with extraordinary care.” I’m going to pray for them. You’ve heard this a thousand times. It’s no new news, but Lent highlights it. One woman on Wall Street, when given this counsel, said, “I do pray for my boss. I pray every day in Lent that she gets exactly what she deserves.” I don’t think she got the spirit of the.... You and I have been hearing this stuff for years, but it’s tough. It’s still tough. The ordinary things. I informed the Spiritual Director, when I was in high school seminary, “For Lent, I am putting pebbles in my shoes.” I was a sophomore in high school. And he said, “I have seen your latest report card. Remove pebbles. Study Algebra.” By which, he meant the ordinary difficult routine, ugh! ouch tasks. That’s great penance. That’s great. Lent merely highlights how valuable it is.

The “U” is “unfathomable” (It’s a five syllable word which means “Huh? What?.”)... Today’s gospel opens. Our Lord is still talking to Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a big-shot Pharisee, and he goes to see Our Lord at night because he’s scared the other Pharisees won’t like it. Remember a little while back, on Sunday, Our Lord says, “You’ve got to be born again.” And Nicodemus says, “Huh? That is unfathomable. How can I get back into my momma’s body?” And you know what Our Lord goes on to explain. “I mean again, in your heart, in your spirit. You’re going to be reborn.” New outlook. So much of what you and I hear every Sunday is unfathomable. We take it on faith, which is a gift. That’s a gift that can be a punishment. I live on the property of a doctor. He’s a Catholic. He comes to this parish. And I was mentioning this, how much of our faith is unfathomable. Huh? I don’t get it, Lord! And he said, “You know only Christ would have the nerve to ask us to believe some of the things he says.” He makes so much sense and so much transcendent wisdom and goodness in Christ, and now and then he says things.... Huh? The cross? That’s the great sign that’s going to save the world? But then, the doctor added, “But only God would have the chutzpah to ask us to believe some of those things.” An ordinary person would make everything palatable, digestible and easily fathomed. I get it. Not God. Sometimes he asks us to hang on with the Huh?

And the “C” is the cross. O U C... And by the cross I simply had the fun of studying over, this past season, the history of the cross in art. You know, the early Christians were so embarrassed that their leader, Jesus, died that way. It was gross! We see kids wearing crosses and we take it for granted. But to die on a cross in the early Christian days, disgusting, awful, gross. So they would never draw a cross, the early Christians. They would communicate, if they wanted to indicate Jesus, they would draw a little fish, which was Greek letters meaning “Jesus.” Later on, when you got a cross, you got the kind we got which is now covered (pointing to the cross in the church) of Christ on the cross but regal, splendid, triumphant king. It was only with Francis of Assisi in the fourteenth century that you got pictures of Jesus dying the way Jesus died, suffocating, not able to breathe, lifting up, lifting down, twisted. Salvador Dali is a painter who is not “in” with the snobs right now. But I love Dali’s work. And Dali, in our own lifetime, painted Christ crucified on an office building. And some of you tomorrow, Monday, will have to step into a work which might be a daily penance, on your nerve ends. Well, Christ is there with you.

And finally, we are up to the last one, Hell! Hell is the absence of God and Our Lord makes very clear how you get into Heaven, how you escape Hell. “I was hungry. You helped. ... I was thirsty. You helped. ... I was naked. You helped. ....I was sick. You helped. ... I was in jail....” You know. That is the foundation of how we get to Heaven, which is not an illusion. It’s a reality. But Hell is the opposite. Now, the Church does not say any human is in Hell. The Catholic Church says Hell exists and the demons are there. It doesn’t consign any human. And St. Thomas Aquinas, who was no liberal, said he found it very hard to imagine anyone deliberately dying in mortal sin, totally rejecting Christ. The symbolisms for Heaven in the Bible are a party, a posh event, a family gathering where you like everybody, music and dining. They’re symbols. You and I know, but it’s people together having great fun. Now, according to the new translations of Christ’s words, we get a different highlight. Heaven is exactly that kind of thing, and if there is such a thing as one human being who has totally rejected.... You’re sick. Forget it! You’re hungry. Forget it! You’re lonely. Forget it! I just want me! Then, basically according to theologians, especially C.S. Lewis, we see God in Heaven at the moment of death. That’s good Catholic theology. We take a look and we say “The hell with it!” If there be such a person, they don’t want that. All they want is me. If there be such a person, all I want is me, all I’ve ever wanted is me, and we slam the door, not God. Jesus talks about God, the door’s always open. It’s the person (if there ever was one) who takes a look and says, “Not for me. I didn’t want it on earth and I don’t want it.” We slam the door. We are delighted to dive into me, only me.

Now, some of us had a foretaste of Hell at some point in our lives. Can I just tell you one quick one? A taste of what Hell must be like.... There is a New York City Subway, 1951, and we were going uptown, underground and at 103rd St., it wasn’t rush hour. There were empty seats but it was pretty crowded. At 103rd St., a kid came in, about seventh or eighth grade, small for his age I thought, and he had his mom with him. And she was very sloppily, spectacularly drunk. And she was slipping. I remember her heel on her left shoe was coming off and the kid was getting her in and sitting her down. And we all kept our heads down, including the one who wanted to be a priest some day. And he held onto her and he was anxiously checking out the stations, 103rd, 110th, 116th.... And then he spoke to her, and there was dead silence. “OK, Mom. It’s the next stop.” She was so out of it, and he got her up and he looked around at us and we all kept our heads down. He got her to the door and the sliding doors opened and he got her out. And, as the doors were shutting, she was on the platform, and he turned around and he raked us with his eyes. He just raked us with his eyes of pain and why didn’t somebody help. And all the way up to 125th St. I said to myself, “ Well I didn’t want to embarrass the boy.” I didn’t want to embarrass me, and all of us keeping our heads down when this kid was struggling with this dissheveled mommy, I thought we were in Hell. “This is Hell. To feel like this, to have done this, not done this... That’s a taste of Hell.”

Anyhow, OUCH! In ordinary parlance, “ouch” means it hurts. And people around us, not just in Iraq or in starving places, in suffering like Haiti, but all around us there are some people who say “ouch” in their belly because they are hungry or they say “ouch” in their heads because they need some hint of a hope. They say “ouch” in their hearts because they want some companionship, some contact, maybe just for a little while. And the great thing about St. Theresa, “just do the ordinary thing with care” and the pastor, “...one noble deed.” By the time Lent 2006 is over, you and I will be able to say something we said or did made one human being feel one less OUCH.