The Relational and Sacramental Character of Lent, Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Ash Wednesday
February 14, 2018
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: 

• Today as we begin the Holy Season of Lent, it’s tempting for us to focus on ourselves, our whatever our Lenten practices will be with regard to prayer, fasting and almsgiving. But I think it’s far more valuable for us to focus on the quasi-sacramental and relational aspects of this season.
• Pope Francis wrote about the former in his 2018 Lenten letter, when he, basing himself on the liturgy, calls it a “sacramental sign of our conversion.” Like the ashes we’ll receive today, it’s an external reminder of the Church’s need for conversion, reparation, and receiving God’s mercy. The Church is semper reformanda — it’s always in need of conversion — and Lent is the time that helps us not only never to forget that reality but grow in the repentance to which God calls us and through us calls the world.
• As deep as that is, I’d like to spend most of our time pondering the relational aspect of this season. It’s meant to help us turn away from all the ways in which we do not love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and in which we do not love our neighbor as God loves us. Lent as a whole, and the practices to which we’re called, are meant to help reestablish and deepen these two relations.
• In the first reading, God tells us through the Prophet Joel, “Return to me with your whole heart. … Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the Lord, your God.” It’s not enough to pray, fast, and give alms heroically. Through each of these practices we’re called to rend our hearts completely, so that once our heart is open, he can come to fill it. The Jews, when they beheld serious sin, would always rend their garments, which meant to tear open the upper parts of their tunics and cloaks near their neck, which would be laced together like shoelaces. When they rent their garments, they broke the shoelaces in testimony that what they had observed was immoral. God tells us he doesn’t want us ripping open our clothes. He doesn’t want our repentance to be fundamentally shown with things. He wants us rip open our hearts, our whole hearts, “with fasting, weeping, and mourning,” three activities all associated with repentance, so that we can restore and rebuild those hearts to be the inner room where he can come in and enter into life changing, loving communion with us. God tells us in today’s Psalm: “If today you hear the voice of the Lord, harden not your hearts.” This refers not merely to a totally hardened heart to God, but also a partially sclerotic one, one that responds to God’s voice, for example, not with “hardened soil by the wayside” but with superficial rocky soil or divided thorny soil. We often give God only part of our heart and spend the rest of it on other desires. That’s why we need this Lent. God wants us to return to him with the entirety of our affections. And God wants to help us to do so.  That’s why we cry out in today’s Responsorial Psalm, “A clean heart create for me, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” We need a heart transplant. Our heart has been hardened by sin, by pride, by envy, by anger, greed, by laziness, by lust and gluttony, and we need God to replace it with a heart of flesh (Ez 36:36), a pure heart that sees God (Mt 5:8), that is the abode of his love, and that seeks to love him in all we do. The first step in that heart transplant is to recognize we’re sick, we need a doctor, and need to submit to surgery. That’s why we cried out together, from the youngest to the oldest, over and over again in the Psalm response, “Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.” What God wants to do in Lent is similar to what he did mystically with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, when he took out her heart from her breast, submerged it within his burning Sacred Heart, and then returned it to her having purified it of all the dross. This is the heart transplant by which he wishes to give us a clean heart. That sums up all his divine work. In today’s epistle from St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, we specify a little bit the purpose of Jesus’ incarnation that we pray about in the Collect (Opening Prayer) of Christmas Mass during the Day and repeat at the mixing of the water and wine in each Mass, that Christ took on our humanity so that we might share in his divinity. He does that through the “wondrous exchange” of hearts in love that St. Paul specifies: “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” He took on our humanity with all its sinfulness so that in return, in him, he might make us God’s own holiness, his own justice. This is the way Christ makes possible our full return.
• St. Paul echoes this call to a new relationship with God in today’s second reading. He says, “We are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” We are called in everything we do to reconcile our life with God, all of it. Parts of us are in communion with God, but parts of us are not. And so God sent his Son to reconcile the whole world to God and that needs to be first our desire with regard to God and secondly our desire with regard to others. This summons involves, obviously, the gift of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. But it also has to involve our reconciliation with other members of Christ’s body. And often that’s the most practical way after confession for us to hear and respond to this appeal: to become, like St. Paul, ambassadors of reconciliation, bringing people back into communion with God and seeking to reestablish communion with them ourselves. Lent is a time for us to forgive and seek forgiveness. If there’s any separation between us and others, Lent is the time to work on it. We’re ambassadors seeking peace, peace with God and peace with others, through receiving God’s forgiveness and paying it forward 70 times 7 times. There’s an interesting contrast, almost a superficial contradiction, between Joel and the Gospel. In Joel, God tells us, “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.” In the Gospel, Jesus says twice, “When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do.” The harmony of this tension is that we are called to blow trumpets, not for ourselves, but for others. We’re called not to have the attention on ourselves but on God and others. If we’re helping them gather, to fast, to follow the Lord, then we will almost assuredly be doing the same. And he wants us to be doing this with a sense of urgency. St. Paul tells us, “Now is the Day of Salvation.” Lent is a season of salvation in which God comes to our rescue so that we and others might have the relationship we ought.
• The relational aspect of Lent is emphasized in a particular way by Jesus in the Gospel, which is taken from Jesus’ words during the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus speaks to us about the three great Lenten penitential practices geared to helping us reorder our relationship with God (prayer), with others (almsgiving) and with our own appetites, hungers and desires (fasting). He calls us to give alms differently than the rest, to pray differently than the rests and to fast differently than the rest. The essential Christian difference, he says, is that we do things for the Father and not for the attention of others. “Take care,” he said, “not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them.” Many, he says, do good things in order to win the esteem and approval of others, so that others may think they’re good people. Jesus says that what is supposed to distinguish us is that we do them with purity of intention for God the Father, with his help, and as his beloved children, just like Jesus himself prayed, fasted and gave of himself for the Father’s glory and to fulfill the Father’s plans for our salvation. “When you give alms,” Jesus continues,” do not blow a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others.” He was pointing to the fact that when the Jews gave alms in the temple and in their synagogues, there was a tuba-like twisted funnel in which they’re put their coins and it would roll down the spiral pipework into a locked box. There would be many people who would give in order to “make a lot of noise” as their gifts descended through the funnel, turning the heads of those who were at the temple at the time. Jesus said that we are supposed to give almost in a totally different way. “When you give alms,” he insisted, “do not let your left hand know what your right is doing so that your almsgiving may be secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.” We are to give alms, in other words, in communion with the Father, for his pleasure and for his glory, so that others, receiving the alms, may thank him instead of us. God, after all, is the one who gave us the alms to give to others in the first place. With regard to our prayer, Jesus says likewise that we’re supposed to pray differently than everyone else. “When you pray,” he declares, “do not be like the hypocrites who loved to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them.” The word “hypocrite” means “actor,” someone who’s pretending, someone who seems to be praying but really isn’t focused on God at all but in gaining the attention of others. Jesus tells us, rather, “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.” The word he uses for “inner room” refers to the “store room” that Jews would have in their houses. The outer doors were in general not locked and people could enter easily when they were not there. But they retained a “store room,” a locked closet inside where they would place all their valuables so that they couldn’t be taken. Jesus said that we should go to our inner room within us where we store our valuables, where we store our inheritance, and meet God the Father there. Prayer is supposed to be an intimate exchange of persons with God the Father and just like married couples don’t engage in their most intimate moments in the middle of the public square for everyone else to see, so when we pray we should do so in a way that maintains that great intimate communion with God. That’s why Jesus, immediately after telling us how we’re supposed to pray differently than all the rest, tells us — in a section that’s been excised from today’s reading — that we’re supposed to pray to our Father who knows what we need before we ask him in this way: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Prayer is about seeking the hallowing of the Father’s name, desiring the Father’s kingdom, hungering to do the Father’s will, confident that he as a loving Father will give us each day our daily bread, as a merciful Father will forgive us as he calls us to forgive others, and as a protective Father will help us in temptation to avoid doing evil. And Jesus today describes how we’re supposed to fast differently, too.  “When you fast,” he says, “do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance so that they may appear to others to be fasting.” Their fasting, he said, was a show. To others they seemed to be intent on atoning for their sins — the principal purpose of fasting — but they were only adding to their sins by proudly faking their penitence out of vanity. Jesus said that we’re supposed to be fasting in a totally different manner. “When you fast,” he said, “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.” We’re supposed to be fasting in a way seen only to the Father, because it’s he before whom we need to atone, it’s he whom we must ask for forgiveness. As we see with Jesus’ fasting in the desert and the temptations that the evil one gave him at the end of that first Lent, our fasting is meant to help us to detach ourselves from stuffing our physical appetites and desires so that we might hunger for “every word that comes from the mouth of God.” When we fast, we do prayerful penance with our body for all the times that we’ve sought our pleasures over God’s will and with God’s help we gain a self-mastery so that we are able to hunger after what’s most important, God himself, his Word, his will, his kingdom, and his glory.
• This whole discussion of how we’re supposed to pray, fast and give alms brings us to the main point of Lent, which is the conversion of our hearts, our insides, our motivations, our aspirations, so that from the inside out, in all our actions, we might live as Christians ought, in the love of God the Father. Lent is the time when we relive the Parable of the Prodigal Son, when we come to our senses as to how we’ve treated God as if he were not a loving Father, wandered from his house, squandered the inheritance he has given us and make the journey home. It’s the time when God the Father runs out to meet us, to cleanse us, to restore us to our full dignity and to rejoice with us at our conversion. And this is something he wants to happen not just in each of us individually but communally, since as a loving Father he wants his whole family to come to him. That’s why he tells us through Joel, “Blow the trumpet in Zion!” to get others’ attention. “Proclaim a fast. Call an assembly. Gather the people. Notify the congregation. Assemble the seniors. Gather the children and infants at the breast.” He wants all his children, from the youngest to the oldest, to rend their hearts in conversion and fully come back to him. He even tells newlyweds to interrupt their honeymoon — “let the bridegroom quit his room and the bride her chamber” —  because this time of conversion, this grace of renewal, this summons to restored communion with God, is even more important than their communion with each other. God wants us to focus not only how our own ways have erred from his Covenant but he wants our help to convert our assemblies, our peoples, our congregations, our parishes, our neighborhoods, and our families from the youngest to the newly married to the oldest. What happened in Nineveh at the preaching of the Prophet Jonah, where everyone from the lowest to the highest and even the pets did penance, God wants to happen in all our communities. He wants all of us to rend our hearts so that we might all come back as beloved prodigals to his house for the feast. He wants all of us to recognize that we need to walk that journey of conversion, whether we’re like the son who ran away to the pigsties or the son who never ran away but who nevertheless never really grasped the loving heart of the Father or regarded others as our beloved siblings.
• Today we come to Mass praying, fasting and receiving Christ’s alms so that we might do this in memory of him. We come here with our whole heart, tearing from it whatever isn’t united with God, crying out for God’s mercy and being filled with joy that God has given us this chance. We come here prepared to journey with Christ for these 40 holy days, as he seeks to give us a clean, a new, a sacred heart and lead us through the Lent of Life to the eternal Easter.

The readings for today’s Mass were: