Returning Wholeheartedly to the Lord, Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Ash Wednesday
February 14, 2024
Joel 2:12-18, Ps 51, 2 Cor 5:20-6:2, Mt 6:1-6.16-18

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The text that guided today’s homily was: 

• In today’s first reading, the Lord through the Prophet Joel gives us the essential theme of Lent. “Return to me with your whole heart!” Lent is about returning home, returning to God, returning to the life of faith. No matter how far we may have wandered, God wants to welcome us, like, in Jesus’ famous parable of the Prodigal Son, the Father welcomed with joy his son who was lost and had been found, dead and brought to lie again. God invites us, he encourages us, he summons us back and wants to embrace us. And he hopes that we will respond not partially but with our whole heart, our whole mind, our whole soul and all our strength. As we prayed in today’s Psalm, God wants to give us a “clean heart,” thoroughly washed from sin and guilt. Just as St. Paul urged the Christians in Corinth in today’s second reading to “be reconciled to God,” so God himself today appeals to us to convert, not to receive his grace in vain, but to act with urgency to be reconciled. Now is the acceptable time, he says. Now — not later, not even tomorrow — is the day of salvation. He is hoping that we seize this gift!
• The ashes we receive are a reminder to us not to procrastinate on grabbing hold of that gift of salvation.
  • First, ashes are a sign of our mortality, that we are dust and unto dust we shall return. Lent reminds us that we will die and we never know the day or the hour. But ashes also point beyond death. Like at the beginning of creation when we were formed from the dust of the earth and God infused into us the breath of life, so ashes point to the fact that we are not just a mortal body but have an immortal soul, which God wants to infuse with his life. Yes, we will die, but God wants to raise us, even now. Ashes remind us that Lent is ultimately not just about death but also about resurrection, and how Christ calls us to share in his triumph.
  • Second, ashes are a sign of repentance. We see them used this way, for example, by the prophet Jonah, by Daniel, and by the Maccabees. They are a summons to repent and believe in the Word of God. The conversion to which they point is not meant to be a minor course correction in life, eliminating a bad habit or striving to acquire a new good one. Ashes point to how the conversion to which we’re summoned is ultimately a death and resurrection, in which we die to our old ways and rise to a new life of faith with Christ.
  • Third, as we see famously in the Book of Esther, they are a means of supplication, of prayer, for others, for their salvation. Ashes are a sign that we recognize we need a Savior and that, as St. Paul reminds us, now is the day to embrace that Savior’s outstretched hand. God, as we pray in the Psalm, wants to restore us to the joy of salvation and Lent is meant to bring about that joyful restoration!
• The ashes will be imposed in the sign of the Cross on our forehead, in the same spot that when we were baptized, our parents and godparents traced the sign of the Cross. They’re placed there intentionally so that we will know the connection between the ashes and our baptism, the day on which we died and Christ rose from the dead within us, the day on which we committed (or our parents and Godparents committed in our name) to live faithfully in communion with God Father, Son and Holy Spirit and to reject Satan, all his evil works and empty promises. Lent is a time in which we, grateful for our baptism, and revivified in our baptismal graces, recommit ourselves to striving to become the saints to which baptism summons us.
• Today in the Gospel Jesus speaks to us about the three practices that help us to grow in those realities to which the ashes and our baptism point: to die to ourselves so that Christ the Savior might live, to ask for and correspond to the graces he breathes into our soul so that we might live faithful to the Gospel. Jesus calls us to pray, to give alms and to fast. Prayer helps us die to our ego so that we may live for and with Christ, putting on his mind. Almsgiving has us think of others’ needs and act to help them with those needs, rather than be obsessed about our own pleasures. Fasting checks the domination of our appetites over us and makes possible our hungering for what really matters, what God in fact hungers. These three practices are the way by which God the Father helps to restore our proper relationship with him through prayer, with others through charity, and within ourselves through fasting. They are a means by which we enter into Jesus’ prayer, his fasting for 40 days in the desert, and his total self-giving down to the last drop of his blood. Today is a day in which we make bold resolutions with regard to all three and receive the help of our Savior to be faithful to them. So I’d urge you to be courageous in making such commitments to pray, fasting and charity, so that this Lent may be the greatest Lent of your life, and so that you might respond fully to the graces God lavishly pours out during this Season. If you’re still thinking about what to do, I’d urge you to consider the various suggestions made in the email I sent out to you this morning.
• To help us on the 40-day journey that begins today, Jesus gives himself to us in the Holy Eucharist. We begin every Mass with the penitential rite, seeking to return to God with our whole heart because he is gracious and merciful. Each Mass we enter into the “now” of our faith and strive to make him whom we’re so awesomely privileged receive in the Eucharist the true priority in our life. Each Mass we come having fasted so that we might hunger for what he hungers to give us. And at Mass, we receive Jesus as our greatest alms, who seeks to transform us so that we may give him, together with ourselves and what we have, to others, making our lives a commentary on the words of consecration, “this is my body,” “this is my blood,” this is all I am and have, given out of love for you.
• Just like God called Joel to blow a trumpet in Zion, so this is the trumpet of salvation we’re called to blow at Columbia. Because now is the acceptable time. Now is indeed the day of salvation. Now is the occasion in which, responding to the Lord’s call, we return to him with our whole heart.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Blow the trumpet in Zion!
proclaim a fast,
call an assembly;
Gather the people,
notify the congregation;
Assemble the elders,
gather the children
and the infants at the breast;
Let the bridegroom quit his room
and the bride her chamber.
Between the porch and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep,
And say, “Spare, O LORD, your people,
and make not your heritage a reproach,
with the nations ruling over them!
Why should they say among the peoples,
‘Where is their God?’”

Then the LORD was stirred to concern for his land
and took pity on his people.

Working together, then,
we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain.
For he says:

In an acceptable time I heard you,
and on the day of salvation I helped you.

Behold, now is a very acceptable time;
behold, now is the day of salvation.

“When you pray,
do not be like the hypocrites,
who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners
so that others may see them.
Amen, I say to you,
they have received their reward.
But when you pray, go to your inner room,
close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.
And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.

“When you fast,
do not look gloomy like the hypocrites.
They neglect their appearance,
so that they may appear to others to be fasting.
Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.
But when you fast,
anoint your head and wash your face,
so that you may not appear to be fasting,
except to your Father who is hidden.
And your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you.”

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