Master Plan
8 June 2018
There is a genre of films predicated around the hatching of a highly complex plan by confidence tricksters to steal money from an unpleasant villain. Movies like The Sting and Oceans 11 are examples. In each case, the result seems disastrous until the trap within a trap is sprung.
Famed Director Spike Lee took the idea further in Inside Man. The film unfolds a highly elaborate scheme to rob a bank that amongst other things includes one of the apparent robbers being secretly entombed within the depths of the bank vault. In fact, the entire robbery turns out to be a misdirection; money was never the goal, a deeper scheme – the unmasking of a war criminal turned banker – was the true purpose.
Today is the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We jump back to Holy Week scenes of the crucifixion. As Jesus dies, blood and water flow from his side. In the second reading, Paul speaks of a “mystery” that “has been kept hidden through all the ages”.
In the Passion of the Christ, Director Mel Gibson has Satan discretely follow the crowd as Jesus is led to his death. Jesus dies, the Devil’s triumph is complete. In the film, a last drop of water falls from Jesus’ body. It crashes to the ground and suddenly the enraged Deceiver realises that in springing his trap to kill the Messiah, he has played his part in the greater plan of God, prepared “from the foundation of the world” (Revelations 13:8). The film ends with Devil raging in Hell while Jesus entombed in the earth rises in Easter triumph.
God had it covered the whole time; it was we doubters that wavered.
So, on this great feast of the compassion of Our Lord may:
He lives in our hearts through faith, and then planted in love and built on love (may we) with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and length, the height and the depth; until knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, (be) filled with the utter fullness of God.