Today the Church celebrates Ash Wednesday,
‘the beginning of her Lenten journey towards Easter. The entire Christian
community is invited to live this period of forty days as a pilgrimage of
repentance, conversion and renewal. In the Bible, the number forty is rich in
symbolism. It recalls Israel’s journey in the desert: a time of expectation,
purification and closeness to the Lord, but also a time of temptation and
testing. It also evokes Jesus’ own sojourn in the desert at the beginning of
his public ministry, a time of profound closeness to the Father in prayer, but
also of confrontation with the mystery of evil. The Church’s Lenten discipline
is meant to help deepen our life of faith and our imitation of Christ in his
paschal mystery. In these forty days may we draw nearer to the Lord by
meditating on his word and example, and conquer the desert of our spiritual aridity,
selfishness and materialism. For the whole Church may this Lent be a time of
grace in which God leads us, in union with the crucified and risen Lord, through
the experience of the desert to the joy and hope brought by Easter.’[1]
Fasting, repentance, prayer, and the imposition of ashes
were not unknown to Jews; that is why we as Christians carry on the
tradition. The advice given by the prophet Joel in
today’s first reading is both wise and salutary as we enter the desert of Lent.
It reminds us that, first and foremost, we are to recognise our own brokenness,
our own sinfulness, our own turning away from a God of Love and Mercy. While we
may recognise this, any outward sign is not good enough. There is nothing that
we can do in a solely exterior fashion – ripping our clothes, placing ashes
upon our foreheads, which will, in itself, make a blind bit of difference. What
matters, where it really counts, is on the inside. To rend one’s heart, is to
lay ourselves open, to make ourselves vulnerable, and in this openness and
vulnerability, to let God do his work.
It
would be all too easy when faced with today’s Gospel to argue that outward
displays of fasting, piety, and penitence, are criticised, that they do not
matter. But this is not what Jesus is getting at. What he criticises are deeds
which are done to comply with the letter but not the spirit of the law. This
mechanised approach to piety, a clinging to the external nature of religion,
without any concern for its inward spiritual aspect, is where the fault lies.
When things are done for show, when our piety is paraded as performance, so
that the world may see how good and religious we are, then we are nothing but
an empty shell, a whitened sepulchre. The reward which such people receive is
likewise an empty one.
Instead,
Jesus upholds the standard practice of Jewish cult, but what matters is that
what is done outwardly is completely in accordance with our interior life, it
is an outward manifestation of our relationship with God and with one another.
So Lent is to be a time when we as Christians are to seek to be reconciled, to
be in full communion with God and his church. Our outward acts of prayer,
fasting, and almsgiving need to be done in tandem with, rather than instead of,
paying attention to our interior life: otherwise our efforts are doomed to
failure. The God whom we worship is one of infinite love and mercy, which will
be demonstrated most fully and perfectly on Good Friday, when we see what that
love means, when for our sake God made him who was without sin into sin, so
that we in him might become the goodness of God. Or as St Isaac puts it ‘as a
handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of all flesh as compared
with the mind of God.’ As dreadful as we might be, as utterly undeserving of
the father’s love, nonetheless, as the parable of the prodigal son shows us,
there are no lengths to which God will not go. The love and mercy which flows
from Jesus’ stricken side upon the cross at Calvary are still being poured out
over the world, and will continue to be so until all is reconciled in him. In
his commission of Peter after his resurrection, Jesus entrusts to his church the
power to forgive sins, to reconcile us to one another and to God. This
reconciliation is manifested by our restoration to communion with God and his
Church.
It is not
the most comfortable or pleasant thing to see ourselves as we really are. To
stand naked in front of a full length mirror is for most of us, I suspect, not
the most pleasant experience. And yet, such a self-examination is as nothing
when compared with us baring our heart and soul. It is not a pleasant task, but
given that God will judge us in love and mercy, having taken away our sins upon
the cross, despite our apprehension we have nothing to fear. All that awaits us
is the embrace of a loving father. No matter how many times we fail, how many
times we would run away or reject his love, his arms, like those of his son
upon the cross, remain open to embrace the world, to heal the wounds of sin and
division.
If there are
any of you determined to live a more Christian life, there is one resolution
you need to make which is, out of all proportion, more important than the rest.
Resolve to pray, to receive the sacraments, to shun besetting sins, to do good
works – all excellent resolutions; but more important than any of these is the
resolution to repent. The more resolutions you make, the more you will
break. But it does not matter how many you break so long as you are resolute
not to put off repentance when you break them, but to give yourself up to the
mercy which will not despise a broken and a contrite heart. Converted or
unconverted, it remains true of you that in you, that is, in your natural
being, there dwells no good thing. Saints are not people who store goodness in
themselves, they are just a people who do not delay to repent, and whose repentances
are honourable.[2]
So
then, may this Lent be for us all a time of repentance, a time for us to turn
away from all which separates us from God and neighbour, a time for
reconciliation, for healing and growth, that the faith which we profess may
grow in our souls and be shown forth in our lives to give Glory to God the
Father, to whom with God
the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed as is most right and just all might,
majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever
[1]
H.H. Pope Bendict XVI Catechesis at the General Audience 22.ii.12: http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-conquering-our-spiritual-desert
[2]
Farrer (1976) The Brink of Mystery (ed. C. Conti), 17, quoted in Harries, R. (ed.) (1987)
The One Genius: Readings through the year with Austin Farrer, London:
SPCK, 60.
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