Seizing the Day of Salvation, Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Ash Wednesday
February 17, 2021
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 following text guided the homily: 

• Many have experienced the last year, living through the pandemic, as an extended Lent of various forms of penance, fasting or going without so many things we had become accustomed to taking for granted. This year in some places, people were asked to go without even the normal form of the distribution of ashes we were used to, as a sign of the cross on our forehead (like at our confirmation), in favor of the European sprinkling of ashes on the forehead. Here in the Archdiocese of New York — not to mention because I’ve had COVID, and you all live together — we are given permission to impose them in the normal way. But it is nevertheless important for us as we begin this Holy Season to look at pandemic-imposed asceticism through spiritual eyes — despite our fatigue at masks, and social distancing, quarantines and isolation — with the eyes of faith and incorporate them into our Lenten practices so that they can make our Lent more profound.
• Since this year, we necessarily have even greater appreciation for ashes, we should remember their three-fold meaning:
  • First they are a sign of our mortality, that we are dust and unto dust we shall return, as we heard last week in the Book of Genesis in the account of the Fall. Lent reminds us that we will die and so, like at the beginning of creation, we need to be infused with the breath of life, with God’s life. Yes we will die, but God wants to raise us, even now. Lent is not just about a minor course correction in our life but about a death and resurrection, Christ’s and ours in him.
  • Second, they are a sign of repentance. We see them used this way by the prophet Jonah with the Ninevites, by Job, by Daniel, by the Maccabees. They are a summons to repent and believe in the Gospel.
  • Third, as we see in Esther, they are a means of supplication, of prayer, for others, for their salvation. Jesus cites them in this way in his words to Chorazin and Bethsaida, how if the works he had done there had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented in sackloth and ashes.
• Ashes are about all three of these things: a reminder of death because of sin, an external sign of repentance of that sin, appealing to God in mercy, and a means of prayerful supplication and reparation. They show that we seek to repent and believe the Gospel. They evince that we are attempting to return to the Lord with our whole heart and to beg him to spare his people. They are an acknowledgement, as we pray in the Psalm, that we have sinned and a petition for a clean heart. They are a manifestation that we are seeking not to receive the grace of God in vain, but seizing this day, this season, as the day of salvation because we know we desperately need to be saved.
• Today in the Gospel Jesus speaks to us about the three practices that help us to seize salvation, to return to the Lord wholeheartedly, to repent and with faith turn to the Lord for him to restore in us to full measure the breath of life.
  • Prayer helps us die to our ego so that we may live for and with him, putting on his mind.
  • Almsgiving has us think of others’ needs and act to help them, rather than be obsessed about our own pleasures.
  • Fasting checks the domination of our appetites over us and makes possible our hungering for what God hungers.
• They are a means by which we enter into Jesus’ prayer, fasting for 40 days in the desert, and his total self-giving. God the Father wants to reward us, as Jesus says in the Gospel, for our spirit of conversion and living the Gospel together with Jesus. Pope Francis, in his 2021 Lenten Message, talks about prayer, fasting and almsgiving as means by which we grow in faith, hope and love, the theological virtues through which “God speaks” to us and we “speak of God.” Prayer is faith-in-action. Fasting helps us to hunger, to hunger not just for material food but ultimately for what God hungers, in the firm hope that in his providence, God will provide. Almsgiving puts into action God’s call to love him through loving our neighbor, expressing, like Jesus asked Peter after the Resurrection to bring about his penance, to express his love for him by feeding and tending his sheep and feeding his lambs. Faith, hope and love, acted on through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, in communion with the prayer, fasting and self-giving Jesus, brings us into the heart of Jesus’ redemptive work: as St. Paul mentioned to us today, he took on our sins, so that we might “become the righteousness of God in him.” His whole redemptive life — his incarnation, preaching, suffering, death and resurrection — was to make us holy.
• To help us on this 40-day journey, and help us to become in him the very righteousness of God, Jesus gives himself to us in the Holy Eucharist. We begin every Mass with the penitential rite, seeking to return to him with our whole heart because he is gracious and merciful. It’s here we enter into the now of our faith, prioritizing him whom we receive in the Eucharist over everything. It’s here where we enter into the most important prayer of all time, his own from the Upper Room and from Calvary in which we fulfilled our penance. It’s here that we come having fasted so that we might hunger for him in every aspect of life. It’s here, as we receive him as our greatest alms, that we’re made capable of giving him to others. This is the trumpet we’re called to blow in Zion and in New York. This is where we seize our salvation as we behold, and consume, our righteousness and Savior.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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