With the 5th Week of Lent, we have entered this final stage of our liturgical preparations for Easter, traditionally called Passiontide. During this time, we turn less and less to ourselves and our acts of penance-our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving-and more and more to the Passion and Death of the Lord.

Thus in our Gospel today, Jesus says to us that unless we believe that He is the I AM, unless we believe that He is God when He is lifted up on the Cross, we will die in our sins, that is, we will not come into Eternal Life (cf. John 8:24, 28).

We know that on the Cross, Jesus took away the sins of the world. In our Gospel today, however, Jesus shows us the entrance we have into that Cross. It is not the case that we are saved by the mere fact of the Passion and Death of Jesus. No, we must enter into the Lord's Passion and Death if we are to have eternal life, and that is why Jesus says that unless we believe that He is the I AM, then we die in our sins. For, the act of Faith is not only thinking assent to a proposition, but it is true and real contact with its object: the object of Faith being God Himself. So when we believe, we have true and real contact with God Himself, the great I AM who is revealed as such in being lifted up on the Cross.

This contact that we have Jesus, who was crucified and died for us, is not just an intellectual process but gets lived out in action. We religious have vowed to a life of Faith that gets lived out in the Evangelical Counsels of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience which we profess.

In Poverty, we have true contact with the Christ who first stripped Himself of glory and took our human nature (cf. Philippians 2:7). But on the Cross He is truly the poor Christ, with nothing more to give away than His very life, which He too gives. We believe in the poor Christ every time we depend on the community for our needs, every time we go without, every time we turn in something we receive, every time we take care of something that the community owns. Our poverty thus becomes an act of Faith, a daily act of Faith, whether it be small or great.

In Chastity, we have contact with the Christ who took no wife because His love was meant for each and every human being. His arms on the Cross are opened to all who will receive Him. So too, our chastity requires the act of faith that this actually works: that our lives of study, prayer, and preaching for the salvation of souls actually produces something in the Kingdom, that it actually makes people sons and daughters of the Heavenly Father. Our identification with the Chaste Christ thus becomes an act of Faith.

Lastly, in Obedience, we have real contact with the Son who tells us today He spoke only what the Father told Him to say, and did only that which pleased the Father (cf. John 8:28-9). When we receive an assignment from a superior and we follow through on it as it is the will of God in our life, whether it be something great or small, we have real spiritual contact with the Christ who was obedient unto death on the Cross (cf. Philippians 2:8).

Although the grace of Profession is sufficient for living the life of the Counsels, we nonetheless come every day to this altar to receive the very Christ we imitate in the Counsels. We look at the bread and wine, in Faith we see them consecrated, and then come forward to receive Jesus Christ in His Body and Blood, soul and divinity, so that we may have real and true contact with Him, a contact which strengthens us and is the very source and summit of all our Faith.