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Feb. 17 (Ash Wed.) Joel2:1-2,12-17a 2Cor.5:20b-6:2 Mt.6:1-6,16-21
Let us pray: Almighty God, your steadfast love is as great as the heavens are high above the earth. Remove our sins from us, as far as the east is from the west, strengthen our life in your kingdom and keep us upright until the last days, through Jesus Christ our merciful high priest. Amen.
‘Forty days and forty nights, you were fasting in the wild, forty days and forty nights, tempted and yet undefiled’. This verse starting our familiar Lenten hymn also sets the stage for today: Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. As we walk into this year’s 40 days Lenten pilgrimage, the concluding verse of this hymn also reminds us of our good company in our journey: ‘Savior, may we hear your voice, keep us constant at your side; and with you we shall rejoice, at the eternal Easter-tide’.
Yes, to prepare ourselves to enter into the Holy Week and Easter we need to walk with Christ in these 40 days journey, and the best way to do so is to hear his voice as he ‘keeps us constant at his side’. So today in the beginning of our Lenten pilgrimage, we hear his voice saying to us: ‘beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them . . . when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing . . . whenever you pray, go into the your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret . . . and when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father’.
Well, what is our Savior telling us? Of course on the one hand he is telling us the right posture to do our Lenten practices of almsgiving, praying and fasting – Jesus as a devout Jew was also reminding his fellow Jews the words proclaimed by the prophet Joel (as we heard from our First Reading today: ‘yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning, rend your hearts and not your clothing’). Yet on the other hand Jesus is all the more telling us what our practice of piety is all about – it is a vehicle of tying out hearts with God’s heart. Of course Jesus knows it! He ties his heart with God’s heart all the time. At the beginning of his earthly ministry, he was tempted by Satan to go for a
short-cut, truncated version of his mission, he flatly refused it, and set his face towards Jerusalem alone (where suffering, death and resurrection were waiting for him to undertake). At the beginning of his passion, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed with blood- like sweat, saying, ‘Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.’ And Jesus’ last word on the cross is: ‘it is finished.’ Yes, he always sets his heart upon the heart of God. Likewise, no act of piety is worth doing if it is not for setting our hearts upon the heart of God. The entire life, death and resurrection of Jesus in fact are to make it possible to set our hearts upon God’s heart. Let us listen again to what St. Paul said in our Second Reading today: ‘for our sake [God] made [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in [Christ] we might become the righteousness of God.’
All of these highlights shall be our focus for contemplation and practice of the ‘Jesus’ Way’ which we seek to tread on, especially during this 40 days’ pilgrimage towards the Calvary and then to the empty tomb.
In short, Lent is not about fasting, weeping and mourning per se, but rather about rending our hearts to return to God, for Christ has made that possible for us, through his death on the cross and his resurrection. If we still haven’t grasped this teaching and exemplification for us from Jesus, we remain hypocrites, as Jesus told us plainly in today’s Gospel Reading.
After all, all that Lent, Holy Week and Easter boil down to the great self-emptying love of God for us, not about our performance of love for God. If it is something that we can achieve by ourselves, there is no need for the Son of God to be crucified to bring us cleansing of our sins, strength for our life in the kingdom of God, and sustenance in Gods’ righteousness till the last days. For the same reason, it makes no sense to skip Ash Wednesday, Lent and Good Friday to attend only Easter celebration (though unfortunately many believers still choose to do so). Let’s heed Jesus’ pointing us (by his life, death and resurrection) to the mystery of God’s love as proclaimed by the prophet Joel: ‘rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is
gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.’ This is why we are here today, to start our Lenten pilgrimage together: not simply to fast, weep and mourn for our sins, but all the more to ‘blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the people, sanctify the congregation’. Amen.
(c) 2010 P. Lee
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